Coming home

I have spent the majority of my adult life in Davis, California. I moved here when I was eighteen, and with the exception of two pandemic years that feel more fever dream than reality, this has been my home. In less than two years from now, I will say goodbye. And I wonder what it will mean to leave the town that has housed some of my deepest joy and greatest heartbreak.

In recent readings, particularly Hillbilly Elegy by JD Vance, Becoming by Michelle Obama, and Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation by Eli Clare, I have been thinking about “home”. What is it and how do we lose it? Can you have multiple? Why did I come back?

Truthfully, when I graduated in 2019, I did not anticipate I would come back to Davis. My senior year tested my seemingly endless tenacity. While I have never been one to feel defeated or down on my luck for too long, I was weary from a bone deep exhaustion that persisted despite my best efforts. I now recognize that I was mourning the end of several relationships to people who had felt like “home.” Specifically, my Christian community.

For a lot of reason, some my fault and some not, it hadn’t worked out. The truth is somewhere in the middle and all that.

As a result, when I finally left, half bewildered I’d even made it to graduation, I did so definitively.

And yet, when it came time to apply to law schools, I was compelled to apply to Davis. Maybe I was just curious or perhaps I sensed that I had unfinished business with this town but I needed to apply. I maintained I wouldn’t really come back. I also didn’t think I would actually be admitted.

But I was surprised that once I was admitted, Davis rose to the top of the list. Fast. And in the end, no other school held a candle to the prospect that I could be returning.

So, I packed my car up and came “home.”

Once I arrived, I was struck with how simultaneously familiar and wholly different Davis was. In a practical sense, COVID had clearly taken a toll and many of my favorite restaurants and shops were gone.

More pertinent though, I was different. While no longer suffering from the raw disappointment preceding my previous departure, I found that this would not be an easy homecoming.

The first few weeks back were haunting and painful. Every street corner held a memory I wanted to forget and every introduction made me flinch. I had awkward encounters with people who remembered me from before I left. I regretted my return even as I recognized the necessity of being back.

I needed to heal.

For me, the crux of the question of “home” is community. Specifically, how we commune with the people we are meant to share our lives with. JD Vance writes on the importance of community when he says, “[w]hatever talents I have, I almost squandered until a handful of loving people rescued me.”

In law school, I’ve found those handful of loving people again. And I did need rescuing from the neverendingly demand of outward validation.

I’ve written previously of how I’ve spent years trying to prove my worthiness through academic performance. Michelle Obama captures this perfectly when she writes on the hustle of meritocracy, “You live, as you always have, by the code of effort/result, and with it you keep achieving until you think you know the answers to all the questions – including the most important one. Am I good enough?”

Being “enough” was not a monster I could have conquered outside of community. There was safety in my relationships to stop running as fast as I was towards nothing that would bring me lasting joy. So, I did stop, and I am much happier.

Accordingly, when Eli Clare questions the mirage of the American Dream by asking if the upward scramble is really worth it if you have to lose community/endlessly leave home, my answer is no.

My home is people in imperfect community trying, however flawed, to love each other, rescue when we can, but mostly, be present in the battles we cannot face alone. I lost this belief in the struggle of my senior year. But I am coming back, home, if you will.