Going Home
I've fled the city for the small town. These last three weeks, I've abandoned Pittsburgh and all the hustle and bustle for the laid back, mellow feel of my hometown. To put a myth to rest, let's just say all the cliches about a small town are true, and I'm speaking from experience. The wide-open spaces, the lack of congestion, traffic-wise and population-wise, the amount of trees (yeah, actual trees and even a forest or woods if you prefer), and, unfortunately, a total absence of what I've become accustomed to in the big city. For all its charm, the small town life always leaves me feeling as if I've been sent away to a gulag. No, not quite a gulag, but at least a Siberian outpost.

The change, which can only be described as dramatic, affects the psyche in many subtle and not so subtle ways. At home, I feel more at ease, a little less tense, and nowhere near on edge as much as I do in the City. These are all common characteristics, but another thing occurs when I come home. Once I'm here I begin to live a life as close to that of a recluse as I can imagine. I don't go anywhere. Mostly, I stay at home here and read, write, or watch television. Sure, I go jogging and go out to buy a paper or see a friend, but that's it. For the most part, I just linger here with the folks.

Why I choose to live this type of life is multi-layered and, to me, somewhat troubling. The fact is that when I'm home I'm not comfortable going back to my old haunts. I don't go to the coffeeshop I practically lived in during the months leading up to my relocation to the City. I avoid public places where I might be seen by people I know. I don't even go to the library. What would cause someone to so radically alter their life when they return home, a place where they are admittedly more at ease?

As much as there is any answer, the only one I can come up with is that I feel as if there's an impending sense of failure lingering about me. Now, I don't mean a sense of failure that would lead me to give up all hope for life and such, far from it. My biggest fear is that the old places I used to frequent, and by extension the people at these old haunts, have evolved, advanced beyond where they were when I was a much more frequent presence in their lives. On the other hand, I haven't evolved or advanced beyond my previous life here. Life now consists of a jobless limbo and a stasis so frightening and paralyzing that I'm not sure whether I'm supposed to just give up and move on to something else or to stick to my guns and proceed with utmost speed and confidence in a pleasant outcome. Life, as I thought it would be when I left, hasn't progressed as I would have liked. Thus, my greatest fear is that if I chose to return to these old, familiar places, I'd have to explain my presence, and I don't want to do that anymore. I'm sick of dwelling on my life and my future. I'm sick to death of discussing it with everyone around me, and the thought of having to walk into one of these places, be recognized and being asked to explain myself fills me with a nauseous feeling beyond reproach.

Most of this stems from the fact that, before the move, I wasn't concerned with anything other than life in the immediate here and now. The future wasn't a term I thought about frequently, at least not as a concept that had implications for my life. As long as I knew that there were months, weeks or days ahead of me, life seemed to progress without any sort of need to dwell on what might lie ahead. The future was, or so I thought, an abstract concept I need not worry about until it arrived. In this manner, I proceeded in what amounts to a rose-tinted haze. I'll refrain from referring to it as rose-tinted glasses because I don't feel that it was so much my unwavering, positive outlook on life so much as it was a delusional aspect of my psyche that refused to look beyond the perfect haze of life in the present. Anything beyond that would be something to deal with when I got there. This type of delusion was something, I thought, was reserved for those with certain bent personality. Someone not quite connected with the here and now. I don’t mean to imply mental illness, but those with an ability to sustain a certain sense of positive, uplifting optimism and a regard for life’s outcomes as a mere whim or a direction set by a higher power. The religious and the eternally optimistic.

One delusion that could likely be applied to what I’ve described above, though, is that of grandeur. The one problem with assuming that my returning would have any impact at all is one of egotistical and, I guess, self-esteem-related aspects of the psyche. On the one hand, to assume that your life matters so much to others that your leaving has such a noticeable affect is rather egotistical in nature. On the other hand, to assume that your presence or absence might have an impact on others is to belie some sort of psychological deficientcy that screams of a low self-concept. In other words, to think that you're missed is to assume popularity and impact. To assume you're not missed, seems to scream of low self-esteem and a wanton attempt at sympathy. Either way, someone can read more into the issue than necessary. This isn't meant to be a psychological examination. Rather, I'm attempting to reason out a problem I have with the notion of returning at this point in my life.

What it boils down to is an issue of embarrassment. I'm, to put it bluntly, embarrassed by my current station in life, and why shouldn't I be? I don't think it's wrong to think that you should be further along in life when it’s apparent that you're not progressing as quickly as others are or as far as you think you should be. No matter how much I’m assured that I’m not the only one, it’s hard to take much solace in the fact that I’m in the same boat as many others. Coming home is both a blessing and a curse, a blessing in that I love being here with my family, and I love my home, but it's also a curse because this walking limbo is suffocating my notion of how I should be able to feel when I'm back.

The eternal optimist in me screams that life will proceed in a manner that, albeit somewhat rocky and unpredictable in nature, ends in the just manner. Practical matters, however, have a tendency to rear their ugly heads upon reality, and the reality is setting in that I won't feel completely at ease with life in the town where I grew up until my life gets on track with a future that's upon the horizon, and not some far off concept that hasn't even reached the upper levels of the atmosphere.