At the end of the school year, with my reserves of energy depleted, I was in a meeting and for an ice breaker we were asked to say what the first sentence of our memoir would be. My response was "A voluntary exile is still an exile." Perhaps my complete fatigue had allowed me to dig deep for that insight, since I have been thinking about it ever since.
I will soon be driving back to my rural Nebraska homeland for the first time since Christmas of 2019. I am very excited to see my parents, sisters, niece, nephews, cousins, aunts, uncles, family friends, childhood chums, college compatriots and random encounters with old acquaintances. At the same time I have other, more conflicted emotions.
These stem from my voluntary exile.
While I long to see the endless Plains skies, the shoulder high July corn, and experience the eerie pressure drop whiplash of a prairie storm, I am dreading the negative comments about my move to the East Coast or the masks my children will be wearing in public places. A relative of mine is making a similar trip to the interior from the west coast, and we have promised to share a list of "WTF Americuh?!?" moments from our respective journeys to commiserate.
Every time I go home it feels more and more foreign to me. Some of this is to be expected, of course. People I know have died or left, old haunts have closed down. With the deepening political and regional divides, however, the sense of distance has intensified. For all intents and purposes, I have chosen the "other side."
The process began in my teen years, when my political consciousness emerged and I got some chances through school activities to go to cities (Omaha, St Louis, and Chicago). This happened after enduring years of bullying, which already made me feel like an outsider in my own hometown from a very young age. I knew probably as early as age 12 that I was not going to be staying in my hometown. It didn't feel like I was making a choice, more that it had been chosen for me. Still, I never saw myself going that far away. I went to college in Omaha, and for most of that time sort of figured that's where I would settle down. That way I could have the pleasures of a mid-sized city without really leaving my home region.
However, I embarked on an academic career and went to live in Chicago for two years after college, and that changed everything. Committing to that profession is like committing to the clergy, and I knew from that point that I would live wherever the four winds took me, which I pretty much did in the eleven years after I left Chicago. By the time all was said and done I met a Jersey girl and moved to the east coast and was working in Manhattan. At no point did I ever think I had to move back to Nebraska, but as the years went on I realized I had become a sort of voluntary exile.
Ten years ago when I moved from rural Texas to New Jersey the red-blue divide was stark; nowadays it seems completely insurmountable. The yard signs and bumper stickers tell the tale pretty clearly. The Black Lives Matter and LGBT signs and banners I see in my New Jersey neighborhood are far scarcer back home, where I am more likely to see anti-abortion billboards and Trump stuff. The feeling I get is that I am an imposter, a representative of enemy forces. A couple of times people I don't even really know have questioned my living in New Jersey when making casual conversation, as if there is something wrong with me. I dread having that happen again because my reservoirs of politeness have been drained.
This also pains me because as much as I felt alienated from my surroundings in my teen years, rural Nebraska still feels more like home than anywhere else. I feel like an imposter when I go back there, but I also have never really felt like I truly belonged anywhere else that I've lived, except for the college town where I went to grad school (which being a college town is a special case.) I like Jersey better than any of the many places I've lived since leaving home, but I don't know if it will ever be home to me like rural Nebraska is. The only thing I can do about it is make peace with the fact that I am a permanent exile.
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