I Spent Decades Running from My Hometown, Now It’s Pulling Me Back

In middle age, homesickness snuck up on me.

The day I left my hometown 34 years ago still lives vividly in my mind. While it may have seemed like an ordinary morning—my adoptive mother and I sharing our usual breakfast and chatting about our favorite TV shows—I was trying my best not to let her see how nervous I was. How excited I was. 

I nodded as she warned me about the brutal Northeast winters and told me it wouldn’t be long before I was missing the California sun. I think she wanted to believe that my departure was more like a weekend trip, rather than her 18-year-old daughter moving across the country, all on her own, to a city she may never come back from. 

As we were leaving for the airport, we posed together for a goodbye photo in our dining room. My mother beamed with pride, her arm wrapped over my shoulder smiling enthusiastically, while I attempted to hide my emotions with a tight-lipped smile, my hands clasped in front of me.

But the minute I touched down at JFK, I let the New York energy I had fantasized about for so many years take over.

While I technically grew up in Los Angeles—a dream destination for many—my neighborhood couldn’t have felt further away from the city’s glitz and glamour. We lived a comfortable suburban existence in the San Fernando Valley, a large area consisting of a collection of towns littered with strip malls and a handful of ranches left over from the 1920s and ’30s.

My own neighborhood did have one claim to fame—it was the setting for E.T., with the local park now named after the movie—but as a kid, it felt isolated. Its eerie silence was only broken by the occasional tumbleweed. My neighbors were a mix of people who couldn’t easily fit anywhere else: aging cowboys who still rode horses in the streets and lamented the loss of the wide-open spaces that once characterized the area alongside retired actors and still-beautiful showgirls—relics of the old Hollywood studio system. There were newer residents, too, young professionals who faced long commutes “over the hill” (AKA the Santa Monica Mountains) into the city for work.

My mother was so fearful of car accidents that when I turned 16, she wouldn’t let me learn to drive. I felt completely trapped, reliant on her and the Valley’s abysmal bus system to get anywhere beyond my neighborhood. I daydreamed about New York, a magical city that seemed to contain everything mine didn’t—everything I wanted to be. 

In my mind, NYC was a mythical place. It looked like something out of The Thin Man, and while I could never hope to match Nora Charles’ wit and sophistication, it was somewhere I imagined I could exercise my burgeoning intellect and finally indulge the fashion sense I had developed by carefully studying the pages of Vogue.

I’d saved my babysitting money and part-time office job earnings for two years and, after securing an internship on Broadway, I left without looking back. 

Decades later, still in New York, I’ve started to feel the sting of homesickness for this place I was so desperate to escape. According to a landmark 2008 Pew Research study, nearly 37% of Americans have never left their hometown. Even more recent data bears out this trend citing that mobility is now at a historic low. Approximately six in 10 young adults live within 10 miles of their childhood home.

But as a Gen Xer, this was not my reality. Sure, I had a succession of roommates who, after spending a few years in NYC, all moved back to their hometowns. But at the time, I couldn’t understand why. I was ashamed of where I grew up—the suburbs that defined everything I feared becoming. 

I was a part of a generation that was encouraged to follow our dreams and be self-actualized—and we scattered ourselves across opposite coasts and continents. We were chasing our bliss, or maybe running from our childhoods. Probably a bit of both.

I was a restless teen. I was forever attempting to learn more languages in addition to mastering junior and high school French. Forever trying to escape. I certainly had enough painful memories to run away from. Growing up adopted in a foster home with countless children coming and going, meant I was trapped in a never-ending cycle of loss. This was compounded when my father died of lung cancer when I was 14, and my brother was tragically killed in an accident two years later. 

In my 20s, I was so eager to explore the world, I did whatever was necessary to make it happen. I worked flexible gigs in theater and filmmaking that allowed me to take time off when I wanted. Although my finances were often erratic, the freedom felt like a fair trade-off. I have since traveled far and wide, and become a semi-regular in London, where I love nothing more than spending an afternoon in one of its bucolic parks feeling like I’m in the English countryside rather than a huge metropolis of 9 million people.

But lately, I’ve found myself looking up my childhood home on Zillow. I’ll stare at its neglected front yard and imposing new gate on my computer screen, which makes it appear more like a fortress than a home, imagining who is living within the walls where I once laughed and played. I used to think people who stayed in their hometowns were provincial and possessed little curiosity about the world, but now I’m not so sure. I wonder if they knew something I didn’t.

I used to return home only sporadically, preferring to meet family and friends in New York, or other destinations. Whenever I did go back, it felt more out of duty rather than desire. 

But something has changed. 

It started with a trip I took a few years ago with my sister. She now lives in Northern California, but we decided to meet in LA and spend some time with old friends and family in the Valley, dining at our favorite haunts and discovering new ones throughout the city. We also morphed into LA tourists, relishing in some Old Hollywood nostalgia at Universal Studios and going to see the movie star handprints in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. As a teen, these were the kinds of activities I would roll my eyes at. But we enjoyed it so much that we did it again the following year.

I’ve spent so long in NYC—where life can feel so busy and lonely at the same time—that I had forgotten the pleasures of a slower pace of living, of having space to breathe, of a backyard with a lemon tree. One warm evening on our last trip, my sister and I found ourselves standing on the edge of a hillside admiring the sunset. We turned and looked at each other, “It is beautiful, isn’t it?” I said.  

I’m not sure it’s just the perfect combination of time and distance, but over the past few years my trips home have allowed me to see the place I spent so long trying to escape with a new set of eyes—and my sister and the rest of my family in a new light as well.

I’ve realized that people and places shape who we are. The Wizard of Oz was my favorite movie as a child, looking forward to watching it at the same time every year on network television. But, even then, I felt unrooted and questioned the idea of home. I was so afraid of becoming one of the people around me, so at 18, I ran as far away from them as possible. 

When I return now, I slow down and spend time with my extended family members I used to deem boring. I thought we didn’t have anything in common and often felt competitive with my cousins, as teenage girls do. But I now treasure their company more than I ever thought possible. The deep familiarity of the place I once found monotonous is now a source of comfort and a salve for my chaotic city life. 

I’m not sure if I’ll remain in NYC, the place I’ve called home for the past 34 years. It turns out, like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, I’ve always had a place to return to. It was there all along, just waiting for me to come home. 

---

Want our stories delivered to you? Sign up for our newsletter, then follow us on Instagram, Threads, and Facebook for regular updates and a lot of other silliness. And if you’ve liked what you’ve read and want to help us keep bringing stories your way, please consider a small donation.