I'm really, really not from here

I still feel awkward when people ask me where I'm from. 

I was born in Central California. I lived there for 15 years and 8 months. 

My family then moved to Idaho. I lived there for 3 years and 8 months, before serving a mission.

On my mission, I told people I was from Idaho. Until I had a companion who had lived in Idaho his whole life. He told me I couldn't tell people I was from Idaho because I only lived there for 3 years and I've never been fishing before. He didn't seem very serious when he said this. But he was correct.

LOGAN

I've lived a collective 10 years of my adult life in Logan UT. I've kinda adopted the place as "where I'm from" over the years. But there's become a contradiction in recent years. The longer I live here, the less it feels like home. 

By the time I hit 30, I found myself surrounded by peers my age who have strong reasons to live here. Coming across more people who were born and raised here, and will likely never leave their family community. I'm even still in touch with a handful of college friends from wherever the heck else in America. Many have found a spouse here; some of whom have started their own family to focus on. I myself love the scenery here. I've explored every street in town and every trailhead up the canyon. I had a few cool semesters at Utah State University, where I graduated from 8 years ago. Am I just living here because the atmosphere makes me nostalgic for the flare of my young adulthood?

Ummm... Yes. 

CALIFORNIA v IDAHO

So it's hard to say I'm from Logan. And I can't say I'm from Idaho. Should I just say I'm from California? I would, except for the fact that I don't really remember it.

I should remember it though, right? That's where I developed as a human being for over 15 years. The orchards, the freeways, being "the token Mormon kid" in every class. All unrecognizable to me.

I usually think of my life as though it never began until I turned 17. My junior year at Jerome High School in Idaho. I switched from thinking of acting as something fun I was getting into, to treating it like an art of progress. I accumulated a lot of new friends. I started going through the pivotal adolescent emotional course. I was really molding as a person for a couple years there. Does this make Jerome ID the place where I truly feel like I'm at home?

The answer is apparently a hard "no." I've had a few stints of living in Jerome as an adult, and most of that time really sucked. I mentioned earlier that I've begun feeling like I'm just a long-term tourist stuck in Logan, surrounded by homebodies. Jerome is like that times 10. If you can imagine.

To me, for any reason, I never felt like my California upbringing was important. But I tell ya what. It's apparent that I definitely didn't grow up in any place like Jerome ID or Logan UT.

NOWHERE

I don't know where I'm from because no place feels like home to me. I'm living a life where I rarely feel any sense of security. Seems like I only feel at home when I'm listening to music or spending time outside. But come to think of it, this was once something liberating for me.

When I was 17, my favorite artist was Beck. A notably weird dude from LA who built a career on refusing to be defined by a genre. Looking back, I have mixed feelings about Beck's shtick, but I believe I totally needed an artist like him in my teenage life. His music never sounded like he was from California. Honestly, he doesn't sound like he's from any particular place at all. I don't think he represented counter-culture. I think he was laughing at the idea of "cultural significance" itself. There's a world of beautiful and terrible music out there. There are millions of people from California. I learned that being from California doesn't have to mean anything. 

It's kinda ironic that I never got into the hip Californian clichés until I moved to Idaho. Stuff like getting involved in theatre, siding with leftist political ideals and loving weird music. In fact, one of my favorite bands is this old 90s band from Stockton CA. I was a kid living in Stockton in the 90s. But I never knew this band existed until I was an Idaho teenager with internet connection.

The band is Pavement, and their album Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain was the soundtrack to my final days of high school. As senior, I could hardly recollect my California freshman year. But as far as I was concerned, this band's rather ugly sound was a close sonic approximation to what the streets of Stockton looked like. Their song "Lions (Linden)" is even titled after the farm-town high school I briefly attended.

As a teenager, it was as though developing my own aesthetic helped me grow my own community. Perhaps having a stronger sense of self and having a reliable community around you go hand-in-hand. And when no place feels like your home, you can always at least have your self. 

I wish that was the end of this blog post.

WHERE AM I FROM?

Where am I from?

I don't know. It's become harder for me to identify myself with any place--or any thing at all--as I've gotten older. I was always under the impression that this stuff would be less dramatic with age, and yet I find it more difficult than ever. As much as I glorify my teenage era of self-discovery, that progression was definitely cut short. An incomplete development, despite doing things that were supposed to make me my own man, like serving a mission and going to college and working fulltime jobs. 

The fact that my first 17 years feel irrelevant to my life might be a thing. Like maybe there's some inner-child stuff to work on there. Like maybe I was always a tight-wound sensitive boy and maybe that boy never went away and I hate that boy, but you didn't hear that from me.

Anyways... I live in Logan, but I'm really, really not from here. There's no real place or thing that makes me feel at home, or in touch with myself. Not for longer than a few minutes, anyways. At some point, I can't lean on my locale or my music taste or my past highlights to define who I am. I think I have to begin some things that are much harder to begin than anything I've ever begun before. 

So I'll tell you where I'm from when I get there.