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What’s the connection between location and identity? Do the same kinds of people move to the same kinds of places, or do places make their residents roughly the same? Where do we get our ideas of how it feels to live somewhere, and what happens when we’re wrong? Are people actually the same everywhere, and if so, why do we place so much stock in where we’re from?
California to Indiana
When I tell people I moved to Bloomington, Indiana from California, most of the time the response is a scrunched-up face and a befuddled, “Why?”
I’ve had this conversation at the grocery store, while the purple-haired cashier with a “They/ Them” button swooped my produce across the scanner. I’ve had it during socially distanced first dates with stereotypically-midwestern-bearded guys I’ve met on OKCupid, our coffee cups steaming as we walked under bare trees and gray skies.
The response is a scrunched-up face and a totally befuddled, “Why?”
I’ve had it at Planned Parenthood while the doctor settled between my legs over a tray with a Paragard, gauze, lube, and a needle full of lidocaine for my cervix (they didn’t do this when I got an IUD ten years ago, and I’m glad things have changed a bit). This was right after I asked her how often the woman with the prayer beads and the man who hollered at me, “Miss, are you here for an unplanned pregnancy?” occupied the parking lot. “Every single day,” the doctor said sadly.
I always give the same answer to, “Why?” It’s not the whole truth, but it’s simpler to explain it this way.
“The people outweigh the weather.”
My newly-fellow Indianans roll their eyes in disbelief. “Wait til you get to February,” they say. They don’t know that’s when I arrived.
February
Three days after I got here, a snowstorm buried my Prius up to its California plates. My neighbors pulled the windshield wipers up so they (the wipers, not my neighbors) wouldn’t freeze to the glass overnight.
The next morning, I struggled pointlessly with a shovel to dig my car out due to some vague existential panic I felt at the idea that I might run out of meds, or my cat might get sick, or I might get super-bored and need a Starbucks. When they saw me out there with my movers’ gloves and no boots, some students and their cigarette-smoking dad descended on me in a horde, took the snow shovel out of my hands, and finished the job using baking pans (there weren’t enough shovels to go around).
“The people outweigh the weather.”
“Home” is where your crap is
This wasn’t my first time tangling with a blizzard; I think the reason I was weirded out anyway is that the last time I got snowed in was before I could drive, or was even really responsible for myself.
I left Chicago at 16 after four difficult years post-paternal-remarriage, combined with the predictable awfulness of being a teenager whose parents were trying desperately to have love lives. I used to be madder about what happened; I felt that some woman came in and kicked me and my brother out of the house we’d grown up in, my dad failing to defend us from her flood of unreasonable new rules. But then I realized that conflict in blended families is so common as to merit a whole genre of fairy tale: at least I didn’t get turned into a swan or locked in a tower or something. I also became a stepparent myself, and realized that no one, ever, has any idea what they’re doing, other than their best.
I spent my last two years of high school with my mother and brother in Tampa. Then I went to film school in Tallahassee, had a short career as an editor in New York until the Recession, went to seminary in Atlanta, moved out to California with my now-ex, and crash-landed in Florida, back with my mom, when the pandemic and the collapse of my marriage made some hard geographical choices for me.
Florida: Where the crazy/ hot matrix is born
I didn’t want to stay in Tampa, though. While I was dragging my stuff into my new apartment, a guy with a shaved head bragged to me, after learning that I worked for an anti-disinformation website, that he’d participated in the January 6 insurrection. This was meant to impress me. He showed me his Proud Boys tattoo, then asked if I was single.
Also, here’s what no one tells you about living in the tropics: unless you love the beach, you’re inside all the time. It’s too hot to be outside unless you’re by water, which means you spend nine months out of the year indoors. Running is impossible, hiking is a punishment, even picnics are crispifying for unmelanated people like me.
And if you’re not much of a drinker or you’re indifferent to football, in party-heavy places like Tampa you spend your weekends alone, watching TV all day and going to the gym in the evening, all the while slowly getting weirder and weirder. I didn’t like who I was becoming: someone who was always lonely, but never wanted to hang out.
Remote worker attraction
When I came across coverage in the media of small towns with “remote worker attraction” programs, I began applying immediately. I’d been editing and posting content online for Google as a contractor since early 2021, and while they wouldn’t guarantee permanent remote status, I was pretty sure I could make myself vital enough that if they tried to force us to come in to Austin or San Jose or wherever, I could just say, “No thanks, and if you try to force me, you’re going to lose me.”
I applied to Tulsa, Tucson and West Lafayette, Indiana, but I loved Bloomington’s remote work program the most. I hit the road with my stuff in late January, arriving just in time for that monumental blizzard.
“Why?”
I chose Indiana because ever since I left the Midwest, I’ve always felt like an exile, and I wanted to see if I could go home. And that’s not something you tell a teenage cashier, or a sweet bearded dude on a first date, or a doctor with a giant needle who’s crouched between your legs with the implicit promise that even if things get real bad real soon, you still won’t be forced to have a baby.
I chose Indiana because ever since I left the Midwest, I’ve always felt like an exile.
The other night, I sat on my back steps at one AM and watched purple rainclouds scud across the sky, obscuring and revealing the stars. I realized I somehow hadn’t looked at them—the stars—since I arrived. I don’t know how I managed that; I’m outside a lot, but maybe I just hadn’t looked up.
Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw that the treetops were… sparkling. Little blinks of green light, plink plink plink, rapid-fire. Fireflies. I hadn’t seen fireflies since I was 15.
I barked a laugh, then I felt stupid, then I began to cry.
This is Constitutionally Midwestern, a newsletter about culture and identity in a flyover state.