Words on Words on a Hometown

There’s something really, really difficult about writing about your hometown, especially when that hometown is a small town. The words just don’t want to come out.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’m assuming here because it’s just personally hard to write about my own hometown, but there’s just something about the process that seems unfair.

Writing about my hometown makes me question a lot of things: Am I being too judgmental? Are old wounds amplifying the point i’m trying to communicate? Am I painting people and places in an unfair light in spite of my own pain?

It also brings up all that pain. Reliving it. Revisiting it, sometimes from a 30,000 foot view. Sometimes from a first-person view. Both of which bring their challenges.

It’s unfair to assume everyone had the same experience I had, both on good and bad spectrums, and it’s unfair to not leave facts as facts and let them speak for themselves.

Hometowns can be funny places to each of us individually as we all grow and see those towns change from what they were to what they are, just as we change. And it’s probably fair to be patient with the places we grew up in as they do change, just as they were patient with us when we did the same.

-Cliff

Cliff’s Note: Try not too be too critical (or too in love) with your hometown; it’s changing every day, just like us.

When Your Hometown Doesn't Feel Like Home Anymore

It's funny how your hometown can cease to feel like your hometown after you've been gone from it for a few years. The question, "Where are you from?" becomes a confusing answer because you may be from such and such town, but that town doesn't feel like where you're from anymore. Your hometown just turns into the town you were born in, the town you were raised in or the town where your parents still live.  

The people have changed and aged, your old friends you grew up with and made memories with have moved away and the restraunts have changed, with your old favorites going out of business and new popular chain restraunts taking their place. The street names can seem to be the only similarity. 

Something funny happens when your hometown doesn't feel like home anymore. It turns from being a town you make memories in into a town that's just full of memories made. Driving down the streets turns into a tour of nostalgia accompanied by a sense of not quite belonging anymore. It's strange. 

Your hometown can become a place of the past and an easy place to look back at where mistakes were made and what could have been done differently; however, when your hometown does become this and becomes a place that doesn't feel like home anymore, it can become a place full of measurement of personal growth. It can become a place of looking at who you once were and who you are now. 

Measuring personal growth is important, as it can reveal both positive and negative changes. Going back to where you were born and raised is a great place to do this because it's a place stacked with who you were. It's a place full of old stomping grounds, and around every corner is a memory and thought of who you used to be and how you used to think. It reveals how you've grown and how you once grew and need to grow again, and there's nothing like a reminder from where you came from. 

Although your hometown may change, so will you. Although your hometown may not feel like home anymore, it always will be, and there's always something to learn from home. When you go home, don't just notice the changes in it, notice the changes in you. 

-Cliff

Cliff's Note: When you go home, don't just notice the changes within it, but notice the changes within you.