finding home

 

When people ask me what made me move to Colorado, I usually give them either the short-version answer, or the long-version answer, depending on the situation.

The short-version answer is: I wanted to get out of Mississippi.

Most people nod to this, as if to say, “that makes sense,” which, although I’m the one throwing shade at my home state, makes me slightly defensive inside. (But that’s a whole other blog post for a different time).

The long-version answer ultimately supports the short-version. It leaves out a lot of details, but starts by saying:

I grew up in Mississippi even though my parents aren’t from there, and when I went to college, I never thought I’d end up back there. Then, even though this IS the ‘long’ version, I say, Long-story-short, I ended up back in Mississippi during COVID to live with my parents. And ends with, Once the pandemic started easing up, I started considering where to live—most of my friends are spread throughout the U.S., so there’s not one city where I have a big community. My sister lives in LA, so I narrowed it down to LA (California) and Colorado. Colorado won because I wanted to experience the seasons.

And usually, people asking me the question understand that answer. Because usually the people asking that question also live here, and understand that every Colorado season brings enough beauty to make anyone want to stay.

Truth is, neither the long nor the short-version of my answer as to why I moved to Colorado tells the whole story. And it’s not so much that I am trying to hide the real story as it is that the story is just too complex to tell. It’s a story I’m still figuring out. Some days it seems like I closed my eyes and pointed a spot on the map, fueled up the car, and left. Other days I recognize my inherent instinct to try to find a place that feels like home, when for so long, I’ve felt my foundation toppling underneath me.

I think Nashville was the first city where I started laying down my own bricks. It didn’t happen right away—I made fast friends with the highway and the stretch of road between Vanderbilt and my parents’ home in Flora, Mississippi my freshman year of college. It felt like at that time, my drive was my home itself, interstate 40 to interstate 55. That six-hour drive, within the walls of my Honda CRV, was where I started scratching my own pencil marks, measuring my change as if I were measuring my height. I used songs to determine how much I’d grown, how much I’d changed. If I could get through certain lyrics without skipping ahead, then I knew I was ‘stronger’—less fragile, farther from the freshman girl making that first drive away from home.

When the highway and the stereo didn’t need to cradle me anymore, I allowed Nashville to be my home. I became familiar with certain neighborhoods, mostly based on the bar scenes. I laid my bricks in Midtown, Downtown, Demonbreun Street. The neon lights started feeling like beacons calling me home. Strangers became family thanks to overly-sweet shots and bottles I emptied at my lips.

In my early twenties, I felt certain that Nashville would be my home, the place I’d settle down, grow my roots, lusting for the freedom of college to last forever.

I graduated Vanderbilt in 2012 and immediately moved to Atlanta, Georgia, to pursue my Doctorate in Physical Therapy at Emory University. I never let myself get too grounded in Atlanta, afraid that if I planted roots, I wouldn’t be able to go back to Nashville. Looking back, perhaps this is partly why I held potential relationships at an arm’s length’s distance away, why I built walls around me, never letting anyone get too close.

Atlanta was temporary—I saw it as a chance to solidify my love for Nashville. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, and I did miss my alma mater and the honky-tonks of Music City so much that I made frequent trips back to Nashville during graduate school to re-live some of my past. To reassure Downtown and Midtown that I would be coming back. To make sure they were missing me as much as I missed them.

But something started happening in Atlanta that would uproot my plans. That would force me to press pause on my brick-laying and reconsider if Nashville would become my home.

I navigated a new life in Atlanta with the blueprint of how to live that I’d developed in college: Study hard, play harder. (At least, that was what I told myself I was doing, when the reality is I was trying to run away from feelings that were too much for me to bear).

My weeks were filled with cadaver dissections and classroom lectures, and I found myself assuming the very sedentary posture and lifestyle I was studying how to fix. Fridays became the light at the end of the tunnel—happy hours at the Mexican restaurant nearby, the tequila running through vessels whose names I’d learned earlier that day. I’d cajole whoever was playing live music to let me have the microphone, and for some reason they let me sing, despite the off-key pitch and slurred words I belted from the stage. Perhaps it was partly knowing that Atlanta would not be my home that allowed me to become so brazen, so bold in my nights out on the town. I figured, it’s a big city, I can blend in– no one will remember me, and thought, I can always run away if I make a mess of things.

But I forgot that you can’t run away from yourself.

At first it was easy to write off some nights as just having overdone things. Wanting to blow off steam from a grueling week of graduate school seemed ‘normal’. Sometimes things went too far, but that was only sometimes. At least, it was for everyone else.

My sometimes became every time, and even though I knew what was to blame (my party-of-one pre-game before the pregame), I couldn’t seem to stop myself from being that girl—the girl with all her messy secrets that were spilling out into the open and creating slippery hazards for anyone walking nearby.

Eventually, my actions warranted an intervention. And though at the time I met the concern and conversation with denial and rebellious frustration, I look back on this time and know how lucky I was to have friends that cared.

They cared enough to ruffle feathers, to sit with discomfort, to say something needs to change.

I wish it would’ve been as easy as that: a come-to-Jesus moment where all of a sudden everything clicks and I find out that the line I crossed had dashes—spaces I could easily cross back over.

But I lacked the courage to peel back my blindfold and see what alcohol was doing to me and those around me. In my narrow view of the world, I was the victim, misunderstood, and the problem wasn’t me—it was everything “happening” to me. Including, I believed, living in Atlanta. I didn’t belong in Atlanta. My real home was Nashville. And, if I could just make it back there, everything would be ok.

Graduation came and went and the thing I remember the most is that I didn’t get to drink champagne.

I moved back home to Mississippi to start a Sports Physical Therapy Residency—another deviation in my plan to get back to Nashville. But, I figured, it was only a year. And with the stability of living at home, I convinced myself that all the messiness that had started to creep up in Atlanta would finally dissolve—that I’d be able to re-group, reset, start again.

But when you sweep the mess under the rug, it always finds its way back out.

I used to think my year back home should have woken me up. Should have lit a fire in me to change. The alarm bells were impossible to ignore, the red flags waving in broad daylight. But denial sits deep—it seems to penetrate into your bones, dissolve into your bloodstream, rest in your heart.

So, even though my foundation was crumbling, I set my sights back on Nashville, thinking those bricks I laid years ago could still hold me up. I moved back to Tennessee in 2017, restless and like a rebel on a mission. I felt that too much time had been lost, so I needed to catch up—make a home for myself here. This, after all, was the place that had saved me. That had made me. That had seen me morph from a child into an adult. This was the place of magic –of freedom and endless nights, of loose responsibilities and even looser inhibitions. I stomped my feet into the ground, forcing the soil to accept me as its own. I dug my fingers into the grass, praying that it would remember me.

But the magic I’d known in college started to turn sour—like a fruit sitting out too long it had rotted. I tried stepping back into the bars that not too long ago had felt like home, but they felt different, staler, and less like home. I didn’t know how to navigate the friendships I had in college—the ones I know were so much more than just about drinking, but which felt at that time, like everything else, like they were only about drinking. I know now that drinking had become such an intrinsic part of my life–I was always thinking about drinking, so it seemed like everyone else must be, too.

And so, I started to isolate, to withdraw and live life from my one-bedroom apartment. Yes, it was in Nashville, the home I so wanted for myself, but it could have been anywhere else. I ate dinner at my coffee table with Netflix drowning out the sounds of the city below. I kept the shades drawn to keep out the skyline I’d become so familiar with over the years. I made a home in the loneliest place I could. And I drank.

That year, I learned that loneliness is harder than anger. That loneliness carries a pain so wrenching, you’ll do anything to make it stop. Including doing the very thing that’s causing the loneliness, because you’ve confused it for a solution. It’s like pouring salt on an open wound and expecting it not to sting.

But sometimes the sting is what you need. The sting forced me to ask for help. It forced me to let go of my conviction that Nashville needed to be my home. It made me take off my blindfold and look a little bit wider.

The sting softened my attitude toward Mississippi, and allowed me to come home (once again) to the place I grew up. Though I balked at being an adult living under my parents’ roof, my hesitancy to do so soon turned into a deep gratitude that I was fortunate enough to start to heal.

Mississippi wasn’t my choice of home at the time, but I started planting roots there for the first time of my own volition. As an adult, I came to know my home town through new eyes, and formed a family in rooms where I admitted my deepest secrets and shame to strangers, only to be accepted exactly for who I was, who I am, and who I was becoming.

When I broadened my perspective, I started realizing my home may ebb and flow. That I may not ever find a place, a geographical solution to my gypsy heart. But I’m starting to realize that home, for me, may be a little less tangible. That my home already has a foundation that I carry with me wherever I go. So in 2023, with renewed confidence and, yes, a desire to experience the seasons, I moved to Boulder, Colorado.

The bricks I get to lay down are bricks I’ve had with me for a long time. They are the bricks from my grandparents that I started accumulating in India and Indiana. They are the Christmases with my American family and the jet-lagged cups of chai with my Indian family. They are the letters my mother would send in my lunchboxes, up until I was a senior in high school. They are my father’s confusing jokes and the way he says his “W’s”. Home is my sister and the hours of make-believe we played as kids, the trails we walked and the secret gardens we ran through. Home is the friendships I’ve made over the years—the friends that cared enough to sit in the discomfort, the friends that care enough to not let my demons be too great a distance between us. And home is the friends I meet for an hour in rooms where we claim anonymity, but where, for us, being anonymous to each other is the furthest thing from the truth.

So for now, when someone asks me why I made Colorado my home, I know my answer may not paint the whole picture. I may have to stick to the answer that I just needed a change of scenery. And that probably will be enough to satisfy their inquiry. But the long version is: I’m still building my home…and I’m not sure exactly where I may land. But what I do know is wherever I go, I’ve got a rock solid foundation on which to lay my bricks.