I spent my youngest years moving between countries that knew how to hold difference without naming it. In Turkey and England, I fit easily. With the Turks, with the Brits, there was room for oddness, for proximity, for ways of being that didn’t require explanation. In Germany, people were more reserved, more formal, but still legible to me. Difference existed there as a fact, not a problem.
Then my family uprooted us to a farm in the middle of nowhere, Illinois. The bus ride to school took forty-five minutes. Cornfields pressed in on both sides of the road, and the quiet carried a weight I didn’t yet know how to name. After one summer, we moved again—to O’Fallon—but the lesson held. Belonging here required translation. You learned quickly who was readable and who would always be asked to clarify themselves.
I left the Midwest the way people leave rooms they’ve learned to survive in—without slamming the door. I told myself California would be lighter. That the air would ask less of my body. I imagined a place where the work of being legible might finally ease. I didn’t know yet that geography doesn’t change the speed at which the world comes at you, or how quickly you’re expected to respond.
People talk about leaving the Midwest like it’s an escape. What they usually mean is relief. I left because I was tired of being interpreted. In California, I learned a different fluency—how to pass as relaxed, how to perform ease, how to let tolerance masquerade as belonging.
I broke my collarbone the week before I was supposed to leave. Unable to drive, I let my best friend’s mother take me west. It felt fitting, arriving already injured, dependent, hopeful anyway.
When I got there, I found people who moved differently through the world. I learned which parts of my childhood to flatten when people asked where I was from. After a year, I moved north to the Bay Area. In San Francisco, I made a home. I learned the choreography of a city that prides itself on openness while quietly measuring how much difference it will accommodate.
At two in the morning, outside a warehouse party, people in thrift-store tuxedos and glitter-streaked faces shared cigarettes on the curb as if they had known one another for years. They were inventing themselves in public. I understood that instinct immediately: strange, theatrical, self-inventing people making a temporary country out of one another.
Then I had to come back. Jobs, money, gravity.
When I returned to the Midwest, I learned how to look like I belonged. I wore a uniform. I spoke in complete sentences. I learned the language of authority. Authority made me legible; it did not make me safe. It did not lessen the work. It only changed the terms under which I was allowed to exist.
I used to think understanding required order. That if I could place the countries, the moves, the injuries, the returns in the right sequence, the story would explain itself. But order is not always linear. Sometimes memory moves by pressure: a cornfield, a bus ride, a broken collarbone, a uniform. One image opens onto another. One place teaches you the language for the next.
I no longer believe there is a place that will save you. I believe there are places that demand less translation—and places that demand more. I carry that knowledge now, wherever I go. Not as bitterness. As orientation.