The Abivalence of Homesickness

A place to call “home” is something we all want. Most people seem to use the concept of location as an integral part of their own identity. It’s often what most of us spend our lives searching for: a place where we belong.

I grew up in Fresno, a bigger-than-it-thinks-it-is city in Central California. Most of my ideas of what is “right” or “wrong” with a city are based on my experiences growing up and finding my identity in Fresno. Despite this affinity for my hometown, however, I have grown to consider San Francisco to be the first real place I called “home”.

Fresno was an incubator for me, in many ways. It’s where I was schooled and nurtured. I was never a true adult in Fresno. I did not really establish my true sense of identity there. I used it to formulate my budding philosophical foundations and life-world views, but I never established myself there as an independent adult entity.

I missed Fresno desperately when I moved to San Francisco. It was a really “soft” move, since these days the relationship between the Bay Area and its exurbs are such that the economy and population of the two are fairly intertwined. Moving to San Francisco was moving “to the City” from the “hinterland”. I’d known San Francisco was “The City” since childhood. It was natural that I should end up in that city as an adult.

Living in San Francisco was an exercise in growing up. I was already 25 when I arrived there, but it taught me a lot about being an adult and “cutting the cord” from the life I’d had before. It was a rude awakening in many ways, and by and large we were unkind to one another. I’ve spilled barrels of bytes on the subject of San Francisco’s disappointments, broken promises, failures and annoyances. But once removed from it, I’m able to properly appreciate the vital role it played in making me grow up and find myself.

Strangely enough, the reasons many people look to San Francisco to “find themselves” (queer neighborhoods and hangouts, dot-com careers, left-wing utopias, cute gentrified neighborhoods) were not at all the factors which eventually led me to the same place. I found myself in the fact that I was thrown into my first contrived and self-initiated environmental shift: in other words, it forced me to be resourceful. Something I set out and accomplished for myself, by myself, under my own power. Most people rely on friends, family and wider networks to give them their breaks in life. I literally broke with my former life and started fresh when I came to San Francisco, and I was more successful in my years there than I ever dreamt I’d be.

San Francisco was a difficult place to live in. But that fact, I think, illustrates just how good I did. I built a brand new life for myself, pretty much from scratch, in a very hostile environment that often eats others alive. It is that part of San Francisco that taught me more about being my own person and finding my own way, that gave me the ability to do it again. Without that experience, I’d never have been able to pick up sticks and move to the other side of the country without a second thought as to its feasibility (and my consequent ability to do it successfully), and with virtually no professional assistance.

San Francisco is thus, more truly than anywhere else, my hometown. Like the red-faced drill sergeant that grinds you down every day, San Francisco made me hate it for its very identity and purpose. But once I moved on, I realized how beneficial that daily drill had been for making me who I am and giving me the tools to succeed wherever I went. It’s an unforgiving place that will never let me back in, and I’m not sure I’d want it to. It’s a tragic place that has so much promise and that I want to love so much more, but will always disappoint me simply because I expect so much out of it. It’s a greedy black hole of a place that will take all it can if I allow it to. But that is what taught me my survival skills; that’s what taught me how much to give and how much to take on a day-to-day basis, all the way down. It’s thus the place I will call home for years to come.

I miss San Francisco. I hate San Francisco. I want San Francisco to be so much more than it is. I’m glad San Francisco is what it is, because it made me what I am today. San Francisco is the home for which I’m homesick today. But it’s a more reserved, settled kind of homesickness. It’s the feeling you have for an old friend you know you’ll never see again, with whom you parted ways badly: today you wish them the best, and feel sour for the way things ended; but in hind sight, you know things could have gone differently, and want desperately the chance to go back and try again.

You settle yourself realizing that finding your place in this world is your own decision to make, and not to regret your decisions. You settle yourself realizing that your love for that old friend and that old hometown are best kept idealized in your mind, where you can control them, and where the bad memories can be buried, and the good ones nurtured. The problems can be forgotten, and the happy moments and lessons learned can be relived over and over again…