You can go home again, sort of. I remember quite vividly the first of many times I read the classic novel You Can’t Go Home Again by Thomas Wolfe. Subconsciously, I think something in me related to the themes so eloquently explored throughout, even as a teenager. I didn’t know the significance of that back then, but time and travels have given my own unique perspective on what home is and how one’s ability to return home is based most heavily on expectation management.
Born and raised in Perrysburg, a suburb of Toledo, Ohio, I had an itch to be around the sort of hustle and bustle that I saw on television that just didn’t exist in our idyllic suburb. My parents were never too keen on going “downtown,” but Toledo didn’t intimidate me and I actually felt more drawn to it than the cookie cutter sameness and illusion of perfection that life away from urban cores strived to provide. As soon as I turned 16, the car of my own in the driveway was just waiting for me to get my license to unleash its potential, I headed north every chance I got to explore the closest city to me and get myself primed for what life would eventually have in store for me.
By the time I was in my early 20s, regular trips to metropolises like Detroit. Chicago, New York City, and Toronto had become my norm and a cheap flight… or a road trip was now what it took to get my city fix in. While Toledo was my introduction to urban living, there was something about BIGGER that just called out to me and I took every chance I could to sample that. It wasn’t until I was almost 30 that I decided visiting other cities wasn’t going to be enough anymore. It was time to move somewhere, anywhere other than Toledo. I decided to give a move to Charlottesville, Virginia a try as I had family there and bigger Washington D.C. was close enough. It took me 4 years to remedy that misguided choice and leave a town that was just too small for me. Yet, somehow, Toledo still wasn’t big enough. I wouldn’t be going home yet.
So what does one do when they leave a place that’s too small for one that’s bigger? Well if you’re like me, then you moved to Chicago. Still my favorite place, there’s something about the City of Broad Shoulders that’s appealed to me ever since I was a junior high kid visiting Aurora for a family event. All we got to see was a little bit of the skyline from O’Hare and from that very moment, I had a date with destiny. I eventually made it happen. Unfortunately once again, things didn’t work out how I had hoped and it was time to move on. But I wasn’t ready to come home to Toledo, not yet. While I will always love Chicago, I couldn’t keep my head above water and I needed something somewhat comparable where I could swim and that ended up being Houston. Houston isn’t Chicago though and I learned that right away. And I loved it too. That’s not only where my love of photography was rekindled, but it was also where I started to put the fractured pieces of my life together and I realized that if I can finally be okay with myself, then I could make it anywhere. Like many good things do though, my time in Houston came to an end and I had some serious choices to make. This time though, I had a different take on things.
You Will Do Better In Toledo. You could not have convinced me when I first set off 12 years prior that I would ever move back to Toledo. After Houston, I probably could have gone anywhere and honestly I even explored that idea for a moment. But what had all of these experiences taught me? Did I really want to start all over once again in a new place? I had nothing left to prove to myself about my ability to make it anywhere but Toledo, and after all of that, I had found an inner peace that didn’t exist when I first left. With that knowledge of self, the perspectives my travels had given me, and a newfound drive to accomplish goals I never knew I had, I decided to see if I could go home again.
Wolfe was right about a lot of things in You Can’t Go Home Again, but here’s where he was wrong. You can appreciate nostalgia without being stuck in the past. You can see the forest for the trees if you leave the forest occasionally. In my mind, once you finally establish what “home” actually means to you, you can go there again. So will I do better in Toledo? I already am.
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