> be me
> go home because parents guilted me into it
> first step out the airport. It’s 1000000° and the air is sticky asf
> IveMadeAHugeMistake.jpg
> house is a wreck. random bullshit piled to the ceiling in spare rooms just like when I was a kid
> mom bitching about brown people. same bitching I’ve heard all my life
> dad talking about how he’s gonna retire soon. yeah right. what would he do with his time if he wasnt working?
> feel melancholy and hopelessness setting in
> tfw you realize you have to live like this for 2 more days until your flightIn the words of NK Jemisen:
“Home is what you take with you, not what you leave behind.”
I got no place to go back too. I don’t have anyone waiting for me anywhere.
If it’s any consolation, I just returned home because of a death in the family. And while things are nostalgic, they’re also completely different, and I know that the time and experiences I had when I was a child will never be the same again.
I can go back to the place, but I can never go back to the time. Things have changed. I’m on a new adventure, in a different chapter of my life story. Many of my friends are gone. Their stories have ended. Mine continues.
Beautifully put.
I love my home town. It’s lovely, quaint, and consistently ranks somewhere on the “best places to live in” surveys. I was really fortunate to grow up there, even if I didn’t realise it at the time.
I flew the nest, found my own path, and moved around a bit. I’ve settled six hundred miles away - and with the numbers of folk in my family slowly starting to dwindle, I’m finding fewer and fewer reasons to go back home.
I miss my formative years, but rather than grieve for them, I’m thankful for growing up somewhere that gave me a lot of joy and good memories. I may not have grown up where I am now, but it’s where my other half and my kids are, and that’s home now.
Also, some things haven’t changed, but should have.
Yeah, the kitchen smells the same, mom’s laugh is the same, dad’s still using the same chipped mug.
But, dad’s prejudices haven’t changed, they’ve only calcified a bit more. Mom’s learned helplessness has only gotten worse. The old disagreements never got resolved, they just got shelved, ready to be taken down again when the time comes.
Plus, the parents think that you, their kid, hasn’t changed. They still see you as helpless and in need of their guidance, even when they’re having increasing difficulty navigating the world because things are changing too quickly for them to handle. Hence the old meme of “take your resume, walk right into that office, and demand a job!”
I get the appeal of nostalgia, and it’s sometimes fun to pretend that things haven’t changed, but it’s better to realize that time keeps marching forward and try to adapt to the new situation.
I’m a bit older than this and I’ve been feeling this too. Getting older is weird.
It really hits when kids you knew when you were an adult are now adults. That, and when you start thinking ahead. 10 years from now, my mom will be 75…
You feel like a time traveller.
You are.
We brought the past with us. We’re still here and we’re advancing our historical works into the future.
So much of what was old is new again. So much of what was new is now a bedrock upon which the next thing is built.
Do a bit of digging and you’ll find it. Do a bit of listening and you can still hear history echo.
who knew our version of poetry starts with ‘be me’
Wholesome.
Wholesome, reminiscent, and melancholy.
I yearn for the time when I was a kid. I yearn for the time when the right side of my body functioned almost as good as the left. I yearn to be picked up by my dad, to sneak chocolate chips out of the baking cupboard instead of just buying the damn things from the store. I yearn for my birthday to be an event with gifts and a day I’d anticipate two weeks in advance, instead of remembering I missed it again the following morning, after having spent my birthday at work. I yearn for summers off and I yearn for fifty dollars to be a lot of money with no responsibility.
I yearn for time.
Personally I’m just yearning for Silksong
Still unable to let go, huh?
I still yearn for the past some days. Days when I would see friends everyday. Days when I didn’t have to worry about bills. Days when things were simpler and easy. But, I realize that my life isn’t as bad as I thought. Parents rarely fight now. We have money and I’m, for the first time, financially stable. And, I still have a good relationship with my parents. When I visit them, I still go back to when I was a kid. Mom and dad would make my favorite food, I now have access to all my favorite cartoons from when I was a kid thanks to streaming. The big difference is now I can actually help them financially and physically as opposed when I was a scrawny, poor shrimp. I sometimes miss those days, but I’m making the best of what I have now
Man, I miss having almost no responsibilities and more time on my hands. But I really appreciate your viewpoint, gonna steal this positivity :) Guess my life could be much worse, made some errors but a lot of things turned out nice. Living a better life than my parents at my current age and there are even possibilities for a way upward.
I wish I had that nostalgia for my hometown. Approaching it just fills me with dread. I hate so much about that place. It reminds me of isolation
originally from the rural southern usa, i do not miss it
Was in a car with some coworkers and I realized I’m now the oldest one in the car.
>be me
>have been avoiding my parents’ house for over a decade
I’ve kind of been on both sides of this.
For me, returning to and then leaving my home town triggers feelings of melancholy but also relief. I didn’t grow up in a stable, solidly middle-class (or higher) lifestyle, so I’m sure that’s a factor.
While I had a good childhood and loving parents, things got complicated the older I became. And even when I happen upon a reminder of the good times or a fond memory, way too often it’s tainted by how fucked up things were at the time.
On the other hand, “the kids” … it’s wonderful when they’re home for summer. When they’re at my house, at least I know they are safe, happy, and that all their needs are being met, in as much as possible. It’s sad to see them go, when I know it’s going to be months before they’re back.
But also, it’s a sigh of relief when my life can go back to being on my terms sans drama and chaos. It’s almost total bliss when I can go out to the kitchen in my undies for a cup of coffee fully confident that the milk jug won’t be sitting in the fridge completely empty (or with a minuscule amount of milk remaining so as to be practically useless but also technically not empty).
It’s nice seeing my parents but everything else in my hometown is depressing.
The things that have changed are depressing because they represent lost youth. But, the things that stayed the same are also depressing, because it means the same bunch of people just spent 30 years on a treadmill and got nowhere.
Spending 30 years doing the same thing doesnt mean they weren’t happy. Thats quite an assumption to make.
You’re the one that made an assumption. I said nothing about whether I thought they were happy. If you’re going to moralise at people for jumping to conclusions, you could at least base it on something they actually said.
Then let me take a crack at it. You are subtly moralizing against their lives as going ‘nowhere,’ suggesting that there is a ‘somewhere’ to go, that would be better than having remained. The reality is you are also on the treadmill, and cannot leave it. You have run faster than it has turned under you, and feel like moving closer to the front of the belt has given your life meaning, just as they have continued to run with their family and friends in a familiar constellation around them and taken meaning from that, but your fate, just like theirs, is to fall and be thrown off the back of the treadmill with everyone else.
“30 years on a treadmill and got nowhere” definitely has a negative connotation.
It’s negative, yeah, but that’s not the same thing either. I can’t believe I’m having to defend the position that not changing at all in 30 years could be seen as anything less than ideal. Did I touch a nerve or something?
I’m not the one who responded, just saying it’s pretty easy for someone to get the impression that you think someone stuck on a depressing treadmill might be sad.
It’s not the huge leap you seem to think it is from what you said.
