No place, like home

I moved a lot as a kid. Rather than write a confusing paragraph, let me summarize with an unordered list.

• Born in Akron Ohio.
  
• Moved to Madrid, Spain in 3rd grade.
  
• Moved back to the Akron area (Bath, OH: childhood home of Jeffrey Dahmer!) after a year and a half.
  
• Moved to suburban Chicago for half a year or so in fifth grade.
  
• Back to Akron.
  
• Moved to Des Moines, IA in 9th grade.
  
• Moved to suburban Minneapolis, MN (pretty close to Prince's house) in 11th grade.
  
• Off to school in Galesburg IL.
  
• To St. Louis in 1999.
  

Moving a lot as a kid has its developmental perks. You learn how to get attention, you learn how to make friends pretty quick, you maybe learn how much people everywhere are the same and so you rise above most parochial attitudes, you learn that place never matters as much as people, you learn that people talk funny in different places, but that you will also talk funny if you live there even a few months, you learn to cut ties when you need to, you learn to re-invent yourself when you have to, you learn to get by without friends when you got none, which probably means you got pretty good at something like music or writing or drawing.

Sometimes I feel like moving a lot made me have some superpowers as compared to people who didn't: I can interact with people without a lifetime of personal history weighing us down, I can bridge social gaps that are invisible to me as an outsider, I can meet and understand people outside their cultural context, I can see what makes people great cut across place in ways that are hard to understand for those with firmer roots in their home soil.

Moving a lot as a kid also has some downsides. You develop a certain rhythm to your grasp of things-- every so often it feels like time to let go, even if it isn't. You sometimes have a hard time forming attachments. You often feel like an imposter. You start to have too many sports teams you consider "your team." You have a lot of trouble mattering to people the way the people they grew up with matter to them. You just don't seem to have clout. You sometimes envy people's sense of place. You are often cast in a role in which you have disrupted a garden of eden. There isn't a long enough time to live somewhere other than since birth to avoid a sort of mark, a mark which is generally ignored but often becomes important in times of crisis, when you are "put back in your place" of not-here.

Moving a lot has given me confused ideas of rootedness. Any claim I make to be "from" is usually based on fleeting memories and mythology. "From" just isn't a thing that I have the way more rooted people do. I swear to god sometimes this makes me feel like a ghost. As though wherever I might try to grow them, my ghostly roots would pass through the soil anyhow. I cannot move back X spaces and be "back home."

In a year or so I will have lived in St. Louis the longest I've ever lived somewhere. There was a time when I was convinced that living somewhere long enough would turn it into that kind of home I envied in people. Now I don't think that is true. But I don't mind too bad, because I have an idea of home that has worked for me since I was in high school, and it was cross-stitched against a white background, and in a frame, and hanging in the downstairs bathroom at some house or other, and it actually looked better than this one, but this was the only one I could find on the internet: