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Visiting my hometown and feeling a bit sad (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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So about 2 years ago, I moved away. Broken spirit broken person, over 3000 miles. However, yesterday I landed for my first visit back here. And I just feel weird. Like I'm not supposed to be here or something, it's very ominous. I constantly feel anxious.

The weirdest thing was seeing how my parents have started to age. And the woods where I used to hang out are all housing developments now. I'm currently sleeping on a mattress in my old room, aka the office now, surrounded by random shelving and printers and stuff. it's really a weird feeling in here too.

I don't know what I expected but I definitely don't feel like I'm "home". It's like some weird alternate dimension version of home. There's still some people I'm yet to see and I wonder how that's gonna go. So far everything already feels uncomfortably different. Alongside that, the rose tint has also come off and I have a lot of bad memories going through my head too instead of any sort of nostalgia. Almost like the different person I was back then is still lurking here somewhere watching me.

Anyone familiar with such a feeling, after being away for so long?

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[–] [email protected] 65 points 9 months ago (7 children)

There’s a concept that we studied in literature in University about never truly being able to go home again after you grow up. We were reading an Alice Munro short story collection but Tom Wolfe famously wrote about the topic.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/nextavenue/2017/09/24/thomas-wolfe-was-right-you-cant-go-home-again/?sh=52caf424ee84

[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Here's the Wikipedia article for the (aptly titled) Wolfe book.

You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood ... back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame ... back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting, but which are changing all the time – back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.

It might get better later on, once you accept that the world has moved on, your old room is now an office, your parents are becoming old people, and time is passing. At some point you start getting nostalgic about the things that remained the same in a different way - or at least I did. But Wolfe is still right - it's not home any more.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

For years, coming back to my hometown made me feel alien, like in a dream where everything was just slightly off. Like somebody came a rearranged my kitchen drawer while I was sleeping. Just wrong.

But now, twenty years later it, it changed. It didn't become home again but a place that I felt a deep connection to. My friends and I are now parents. The places where we were young and stupid are no longer for us. But that's okay.

I can never go back. Nor do I want to. But I understand my friends that stayed or returned. It wasn't such a bad place after all.

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