"Home" Reprised; On Rejection and Values

“… If I can one day answer the “where is home?” question with no shades of ambiguity, it will likely be because I have arrived at a fixed “home” that meets my (admittedly demanding) level of comfort with the term.  It will be a place that defines me, much as Chicago defines Barack Obama.  It will likely be a place in which I will have established firm roots and a strong cultural identity, a vibrant social network and an unshakable community bond…”

-        - This blog, June 2011

Long before I could have offered a correct answer to the question of what I wanted to be as an adult, I could have arrived – with crystal clear precision –at a formulation of exactly what I did not want to be.  That answer was simple to me, and it was simple to me from even before the age of 10:  I did not want to be anything at all like the majority of folks around whom I grew up.

They were poor; I wanted to be rich.

They were rural and isolated; I craved urban cosmopolitanism.

They were hyper-religious; from a very young age, religion seemed liked utter, self-destructive nonsense to me.

They were uneducated; I dreamed of earning a college education from a great school.

They were infatuated with their Southern identity – their drawls, their sweet tea, their diabetes and morbid obesity and brazen obsession with football; that was an identity I unequivocally rejected, region of my birth be damned.

That I ended up in the Ivy League, in New York City, in Corporate America, with – at age 27 – a personal income equivalent to the income of roughly four families in my county of origin, follows directly from those desires first manifested in my youth.  More specifically, it follows directly from a process of rejection.

Growing up, I saw that they were something.  I wanted to be the anti-something.  And I succeeded beyond even my wildest dreams at doing so.

But as I discovered, the process of rejection is a curious thing – because the rejection of a given noun does not constitute an implicit construction of an alternative notion.  Up until age 20, I spent an inordinate amount of time quite successfully rejecting particular things, lifestyles, and systems of values.  The process of constructing my own set of beliefs was largely a byproduct, the auxiliary output of this primary engine.  No wonder, then, that questions of what constitutes a “home” started to seem surprisingly difficult for me to answer as I launched my professional career in my early 20’s and moved to the strange new land of South Florida.

I am now 3.5 years settled into life in New York City.  When folks ask me where I’m from, my usual reply is “I was raised in Florida, but New York is my home.”  And yet, the very way in which I wield the term “home” has changed considerably from how I conceived it even a few years ago.  Back then, I imagined that – as years passed in New York (or whatever other locale I adopted) – I would build ties to institutions, pass through rituals, and establish the types of long-lasting routines that slowly congeal into a bona fide notion of “home.”  In effect, what I was looking for – indeed, perhaps what I was even longing for – was the notion of home best defined by the folks around whom I spent my earliest years. 

What I have come to realize is that the existence I have chosen has made that notion of home an impossible standard for me to attain – and I am, for the first time in my adult life, perfectly at ease with this reality.

Truthfully, and if I want to remove the emotional harshness from the equation, I do not even have to define this dichotomy of values in contrast with the racist, homophobic, religionist white trash societal model in which I was raised.  When I look at both sides of my family, I have myriad examples of folks who have lived their entire lives within a 50-mile radius of where they were born – rarely even daring to travel more than a 1,000-mile radius away from this point.  These folks never have any difficulty answering the “where is home?” question when it is posed by strangers.  Their values and cultural identity were spoon fed to them by mere virtue of being born into and continuing to exist for their entire natural lives in a given milieu; they have rejected scarcely any of it.  And, quite frankly, most of them have never accomplished anything of significance with their lives.  Most – in fact, virtually if not all – of them did not attend college, have never known a six-figure income, have never climbed the corporate ladder, and have never experienced the thrill of speaking a non-maternal language or living in a foreign country.

It has become crystal clear to me that, no matter how romantic it may appear through a superficial lens, the notion of “home” that I may have yearned for as an early-20-something is inextricably linked to their lifestyle.  The lifestyle of the folks around whom I grew up.  The lifestyle of the majority of my family members.  The very modalities of existence, in other words, that I rejected from an early age.

As I said, rejection is a curious thing.  Often it creates voids of understanding and voids of meaning; it leaves you yearning for ideals that seem to “feel good”, which far too often are the ideals that have been obtained by others but you cannot seem to reach.  But on further inspection – through experience, through trial-and-error, perhaps even through a modicum of wisdom – it is easy to realize how this initial discomfort is merely the manifestation of a fallacy of equivocation (equivocation without a nefarious connotation), more simply expressed as a false comfort in comfort zones.  Because rejection does not define, it creates a void that only experience and maturity can bridge. 

And for me, that void is now fully bridged.

The folks around whom I grew up have no choice in their “home.”  Their poverty of intellect, their paucity of diversity in terms of experiential schema, effectively renders their present as their eternity.  Their home is, infinitely, a constant.  I once, out of the error of inexperience, yearned for that.  You see- for me, today, my home is unquestionably New York City.  Perhaps it will always be so, and indeed I hope dearly that is the case; this is not an illogical conclusion given my fierce love for this city and my alignment with its values.  Indeed, perhaps 50 years from today, I will wake, gaze out upon the Manhattan skyline, and be just as swept away by emotion as I was when I first landed here as a resident on July 2, 2011.  Perhaps I will die in this city, just as enamored with it as an erudite old man as I am today. 

But perhaps, I will one day express the same sentiment as I cross the Pont Alexandre III and gaze out on the Eiffel Tower.  Perhaps it will come as I look out from my balcony in West Hollywood at the downtown Los Angeles skyline.  Maybe it will even come as I awake in the Chicago Loop on some distant January morning and watch the snow steadily fall.

The folks around whom I grew up will always have a definition of “home” that, even should I live for the next 100 years in New York City, I will never have.  That is their ideal; that is a core value in their system; that is, in fact, one of the irrefutable end results of a life lived according to their value system.  And I say now, somewhat triumphantly: to hell with their ideals, and to hell with their values.  As an adolescent and as a teen, I succeeded in rejecting those values; because of the choices that I made then, I am where I am now.

To hell with their ideals, and to hell with their value system.  I first implicitly declared that sentiment as a child, before I could possibly understand the full implications of the notion of rejection.  And nothing has ever been more transformational in terms of my material success and emotional happiness as that first bold, morally unambiguous step.