Not From Anywhere

on belonging and home

I’m writing this to you from the second floor of my favorite local independent bookstore. It’s a drizzly February day — dreary, but warm — and I have a seat by a window overlooking the cute town square.

It’s the same town square I heard stories about my entire life. My maternal grandfather, who we called Dee, grew up a few blocks away from The Square. Every summer, when my family and I visited my grandparents’ house — nearly two hours from the bookstore I sit in today — from whatever far-off land the military had most recently sent us to, Dee told us stories about his childhood.

He and friends had rock fights near the courthouse — the same courthouse that still stands tall in the center of the square. He frequented a drug store whose original sign still hangs above a since-renovated boutique. Although the house he grew up in was demolished and the lot swallowed up by a neighboring home, he walked the same streets as a boy that I walked with my own daughters today.

Perhaps it isn’t particularly noteworthy to live close to the same town where a grandparent grew up, but as a nomadic military kid who has felt perpetually untethered, the connection is startling. To know that my grandfather’s grandfather — my great-great-grandfather, born in 1844 — is buried in the cemetery five minutes from where I sit today is something I can’t fully comprehend. Six feet deep, my blood and bones have fertilized this soil for hundreds of years.

Still, I don’t belong to this place, and this place does not belong to me.

I’ve read several books recently that all explore the idea of what it means to belong — geographically, ethnically, culturally, ancestrally, emotionally, spiritually, relationally. When all of those stars align in a way that our internal systems understand, the byproduct is a sense of belonging.

But belonging is more art than science; the combination of elements that elicits a result in me might not be the combination required for you. Shaped by our personal values and perceived identity, the formula for belonging is unique to each of us. Perhaps it is even an ever-moving target within us as we grow and learn and change. It’s why spaces that once felt comfortable become places we no longer fit. It’s why, sometimes, we wake up and feel homesick for somewhere we’ve never been.

Home’s address remains at the intersection of belonging and identity.

I have a habit of telling people who ask that I’m not from anywhere. I have no personal ties to the random place I was born, no relational ties to the states I grew up in, no emotional ties to the place my family has historically lived, no ties to the place I live now. My roots are shallow at best.

I’ve considered that to be a fault, evidence of failure of some kind. Something essential I never learned how to do.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve felt that lack. I’ve witnessed the way homelessness bubbles up in me, the uncomfortable tension of raising my daughters in the shadow of their ancestors — people I’ve never felt connected to. They’ll call this place home in a way I never will.

Sitting here, in a town square that has held generations of my family’s stories, I can feel both truths at once: my own lack, and the connectedness being established for my girls. I might never belong here in the way that they do, but I am here all the same.

In this with you,

Brittany