On a two-day, 1600-mile jaunt up and down the southern east coast this past weekend, I passed the exit on Interstate 95 for a small Georgia island where I always spend holidays visiting family. While speeding by at 80 miles per hour, I could make out in the distance the distinctive bridge connecting the island to the mainland. I turned to my aunt, my driving companion at the time, and shared with her my sudden realization: “I’ve gone back to St. Simons more times in the past semester than I’ve gone home.”
Recently in the library, I ran into an acquaintance and mentioned I was headed home to DC for the weekend. She was confused. “I thought you were from Georgia! Must be because you have so much family there,” she remembered. “You might as well be from there; you know the place like the back of your hand. I can see you really being from there instead.”
This conversation came back to me as I was looking over those southern coastal marshes and towards the island where I had spent so much of my childhood. If anyone were to ask, I would undoubtedly say I was from outside of DC, where I was born and grew up. But if I actually ask myself where I did most of my growing up, most of my learning, the answer is in no way the same. All of this I did while in Georgia: by the marsh and by the beach, at friend-filled dinners and family reunions, while digging holes in the sand and fishing off the pier, while eating sweet potato fries and drinking sweet tea, while driving down the island’s only road with the windows down and radio up, singing, storytelling, guitar-strumming, laughing.
I spent most of middle school and high school wishing my family would pack their bags and move away to the salty-aired island I knew and loved. While there was plenty of talk among my immediate family of doing just this, it never happened. As a consequence, I was grumblingly stuck in my so-called “hometown,” some lackluster, humdrum suburb where I felt both disconnected and uncomfortable. I made the most of it, however; I had great friends, great experiences and an overall enjoyable time. But I still couldn’t wait to get out, which I realize now is a relatively common notion among American youth.
College, it seemed, was my solution. I could escape! I could explore! I could find a place where, much like on small island off the coast of Georgia, I felt content but never listless, busy but never exhausted. And then I enrolled at U.Va. — admittedly, not my first choice, if only due to its proximity to the place where I spent the first twenty years of my life.
The irony in this ended up being twofold. Upon arrival, I fell in love with this school more than I ever could have imagined. But I fell in love with it despite quickly coming to the realization that Charlottesville, wonderful though it may be, was still not my “home.” Nor was my hometown in Northern Virginia, I came to realize, despite having told myself otherwise for the past twenty years. St. Simons — that little island off the Georgia coast — was my home.
In college, people seem to ask you quite often where you’re from. I have just begun to realize one actually has a choice in how they answer this question. Sure, maybe it’s silly or obnoxious to answer relatively abstractly — “Do you mean where I actually did my growing?” — but at the same time, isn’t this what someone is really wondering when they ask you where you’re from? Who cares if someone is from Boston or Los Angeles or London or Santa Fe or wherever, unless being from that place actually reveals something previously unknown about the person in question?
Most people can’t help but be formed and changed by the various places they come into contact with throughout their life. In a sense, we all have multiple hometowns — the places where you were born, went to school, visited your friends, drove through to get to your grandmother’s house; the list goes on and on. “Where you’re from” encompasses so much more than the name of some arbitrary and unchosen town; it encompasses where you came from and what you are. It’s not a simple question — why settle for a simple answer?
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