Are You From Nowhere, Too?
Let’s cut to the chase.
I was born in Texas. I sprung into existence in October of 1989, to Houston humidity and a family that was consistently migratory.
On my sixth birthday, having already moved to Alabama and back to Texas, I was packing with my family for our next move: New York. The move would prove adventurous to a six year old but presumably exhausting to my parents who were hauling 3 kids, many pets, and had to spontaneously purchase a new car mid-trip after our minivan died somewhere in Mississippi.
I lived in New York from 1995–2000, after which my family and I moved to the panhandle of Florida.
In case you’re wondering what all these locations might have in common, the answer is Air Force Bases. My father, an Air Force Colonel, would assemble the family into a car and move us cross country every few years through my siblings’ and my childhoods. It made for many adventures and much confusion in matriculating in new schools each time.
We left Florida in 2003 and returned to New York. I graduated from high school there in 2008. Since then, I’ve added New Jersey, California, Maryland and Virginia, a few more than once, and clocked in 22 moves.
Which leaves me constantly wondering: Where am I from?
I recently saw the 2013 New York Times dialect quiz circulating again on social media and with it, the many friends who take the quiz to reveal their dialect indeed match their home. But for those of us without the traditional sense of “home,” then what is our dialect? (For the record, when taking the quiz, my results say “Reno” — a city which I’ve never visited.) It is as if my life’s constant mobility has scrambled some unspoken algorithm in understanding what precise language I speak or where my roots are the deepest, and generated some wrongly-attributed home base. I’m sure(ish) Nevada is lovely but it’s nothing I can claim.
And I say this without complaint but with curiosity as I am certain I am not alone in feeling this peculiar home-baselessness. My family is scattered across the country and often lost in the wind. I am thankful to have friends literally across the world. But the result is that no single place feels so familiar or so understood that I can call it home. There is no town or state in which I know the roads by heart or the names of every public school. There is no city whose history I know as well as my own. There is no food or culture or religion that feels emblematic of my upbringing. I have no allegiance to one zip code, I have no kinship with one area code, as I change the latter when I change the former.
It is a peculiar feeling when so much of American culture is contingent on state and city association, our collective understanding that each of these answers would indicate a specific home:
It is a feeling of constant discomfort but constant curiosity; like I am learning a language but can never quite master fluency in it. Or that I am somehow off tempo with the cadence of my environment, always looking to find a rhythm that insists on escaping me, or leave me wondering if anyone can catch the same curious song I hear.
