They say a prophet is never accepted in their home town.
But what of us who are not prophetic? What of those common men who simply find themselves returning? Those bringing no great message, just the weight of experiences from a decade of their life spent elsewhere?
This concern has been tickling at the back of my mind for months now, building from an occasional chime to a clarion call. It demands to be reckoned with. And so I write to process and contemplate, to flush out and clarify.
First, a declaration: I like myself. I feel confident in the person that I am - that I have become.
Some clarification: that has not always been the case.
Insecurities and inequities have plagued at my sense of self for most of my life - be they creative, physical, gendered, political, or spiritual. That is a through-line that needs far more time than I have here to unpack, so I will leave it as a clarification, albeit a vital one to understand my current state of dissonance.
At the heart of this dissonance is the relationship between place and self. How much of me is me, and how much is merely a reflection of the place I reside? I know for certain that I have been a different version of myself, be it subtle or more glaring, in every place I've ever called home: Owensboro, Lexington, Louisville, Chapel Hill. Place by place I settled into an identity, combining my own intractable qualities with those more pliable facets molding into some reflection of the people and places I found myself around. I've also found that in each home I've felt a little more comfortable in my skin than the previous.
Unfortunately this revelation, like most knowledge worth having, does not bring peace - only more questions.
How much of the me that I've grown to love is just my love for a place or culture that has worked its way in to my definition of self? Which, if any, of the qualities I so value in who I am today are immutable? Do the parts of me that are environmental and cultural reflections travel, or are some of them geo-specific? Can they be transplanted into new soil or will they find themselves lacking nutrients and slowly fade?
How will my current self react to a place that already has a version of me? A previous home where I've already lived and defined (or often - let others define) myself? Does the current self simply step into past me's life, boldly asserting itself? This is me now, that was me then. Or will they be forced through a reconciliation process - compromising and trading pieces of self to settle on some new version? Would I even be aware of this process as it happened?
Can the new me slide comfortably back in to old relationships that were built on the shared identities of another life? Will my less-admired pieces of past identities re-emerge after exposure to those I built them around and for?
What happens when my beliefs and identities that are ubiquitous in my home today find themselves starkly in the minority tomorrow? Can I create a home for this part of me within the 4 walls of my own nuclear home, or will the prevailing thoughts and beliefs of whatever future environment I’m in find their way in, eroding and shifting, adding and re-building? Is that a bad thing?
How much of this geocultural-impact is macro, impacted by the sum of the community, and how much is micro, based in individual relationships? Can I carry this new sense of self against both macro an micro effect?
Or . . . am I just overthinking (as I tend to do)?
Is my personal growth over 31 years really just the natural progression of time? The gradual increases in myelination stabilizing and optimizing my neural networks to create a more confident and stable sense of self? A homeostasis of identity?
And to what extent is there even value in attempting to wrestle and contort with these contradictions and multiple selves - to attempt to synchronize past and present in a single self? Can we apply Fitzgerald's claim of a first-rate intelligence, holding multiple opposing thoughts simultaneously, to identities? History fittingly contradicts itself in its answers. Legion contained many and was immortalized in scripture as a demon; yet Whitman confidently asserts self-acceptance in the face of contradiction - I am large, I contain multitudes.
With all of these questions stirring I return to my initial thought to find it reshaping, having no value to my state of mind in its original form. Though prophet or plebeian, maybe it doesn't matter if you are or aren't accepted in your home town. Maybe this externally assuming axiom should be turned inward and rephrased as inquiry:
Can one, after finding themselves elsewhere, accept themselves in their hometown?
