When I am abroad, I find myself assuming a (slightly) negative perspective of my birthplace. This says nothing about my family and everything about me. I am incredibly grateful for the life I have and the one I grew up with, but the physical location, I feel little attachment to.
(or, so I thought…)
My family means everything to me, and them, I do miss. However, Phoenix, Arizona—a city I have decided is somewhere I no longer wish to live, is in part, due to my fear of attachment to it and to previous versions of myself.
“If I maintain this removal from where I grew up, then I am free to rebuild my life wherever and however I wish“
This makes it so that when I do return home, I am met with a spectrum of emotions I never allowed myself to experience while away—probably out of fear that it would prevent me from moving forward.
I was talking to my dad the other day, my eyes beginning to tear up, as he retold all the work that has gone into listing my childhood home—a space that holds a lot of love, but a heaviness as well. I love where I grew up, but for the course of my own life, and that of my family members, we have decided it is best to let go of the physical reminder of the trauma that occurred in it.
In a need to protect myself, I developed a narrative of “just needing to get out,” blaming things I disliked about myself on my environment. I felt it necessary to relinquish any remnant of my old life, and now that it is here—that physical reminders of my childhood have been condensed into boxes—I feel years worth of emotions I was convinced I didn’t have, arise.
I reckon with the guilt of moving out so young to (selfishly) live my dreams, leaving a younger sister to fend for herself, and not being there for a family when they could have relied on me, and me on them. At the same time, I have so much gratitude that my heart feels as if it will burst when I think of all the opportunities and freedoms I was blessed with.
“I just took advantage of the cards I was dealt, but now it’s time to mend the broken pieces I left behind, which I wrongfully convinced myself I healed from.“
It’s always hard to sell a childhood home—it remains the last hold we have on the environment that shaped us—but it is often necessary as we enter adulthood. I will leave the neighbors I went to preschool with, the pool I spent every brutally hot summer in, and the neighborhood where my sister and I would bike ride.
The only “room” of mine that remains will soon cease to be mine. However, I have lived in limbo long enough as I establish a life for myself abroad to know that whatever comes, I will find a little pocket of home.
But home, as cliché as it sounds, is not a place. I would like to say that I feel mature enough to recognize this and find comfort in those that surround me, but letting go of the last piece of my old life, I know, will test me.
It’s liberating to know that I am capable of building something of my own (with the support of people whom I love on both sides of the ocean), but changes in something I thought of as constant, are something else. As I apply for my new Spanish Visa, committing to live another chapter of my life away from my first home, it feels like an appropriate time to release the final attachments, while holding onto the fond memories that need no physical reminders to feel the love they hold.
I do know, that no matter where my family ends up, even if my mother and father are on opposite sides of the country, the love they hold for me will always welcome me home. It won’t be the same walls, but the open arms will remain.
And that is far more than most people have…
And is all I could ask for.
Isabella Elena 