For many of us leaving our home towns means getting a real chance to become someone who will one day be a stranger to the people we grew up with. It´s sad, but maybe its also a liberation. We can always go back and reintroduce ourselves, but often it is easier to find out what we´re all about away from the things that defined our younger selves.
A wise friend told me about this AA wisdom – “Expectations are premeditated resentments”. I sat at the beach looking at the sea and it blew my little messy mind. We so often cannot help to have expectations, to some extend its how we navigate this crazy world. We expect the traffic to stop when we cross the road and the clock to move forward relentlessly, because that`s what we have grown to know. We expect people to read our mind and want the same things we want, because we fool ourselves into thinking that at least a few things in our wild and beautiful lives are actually under our control. Going back home in my early twenties sometimes felt like those expectations people held for me, well meaning and reasonable as they were, would have suffocated me if I stayed. There were many times when even a simple question about my seemingly ever changing graduation day would make me want to run as fast as I could all the way to Australia, if not even further away.
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When you grow up queer, your magnetic north might have no geography. Home is redefined through a chosen family, through places that make you feel good in your skin and memories that remind you of your true unicorn self. You leave imprints on other people`s skin and you pass your thoughts on and on so they can travel further than your two feet or an Interrail ticket could take you. You learn to find comfort in the unfamiliar and start to trust that you could make it anywhere if you had to. And if you´re lucky, you find a place which fits into the palm of your hand perfectly that is also on a map with a train station and houses and real people. Real people who will eat plain sweet potatoes in bed with you when you´re heartbroken and who will let you tell the story of your life the other way round – not beginning at a time when you were a grumpy teenager with so much yet to learn, but starting with where you are now going back to how you became that person by magic, faith and by queer miracles.
If you also leave your country behind, you get to be someone`s “fun foreign friend”, you learn that oppression might have a different face elsewhere, but that it stinks regardless and you get to look back on the way you sat at your desk in primary school with the realization that there has never been a universal truth of primary school desks, but that instead this whole thing was deeply rooted in the culture you grew up in. If you also happen to be a German, you will learn to fiercely miss the efficiency you got to know so intimately because you realize that if everything is already so uncertain, it is comforting indeed when at least the trains run as scheduled.
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My home is made of of many things that are kind of physical, but not really. The best place on earth is always on my special pillow, spooning my special dog, talking to a special friend about the universe and the purpose if it all, but it does not really matter so much in which city the bed in question is. The last time I was lying on that pillow I smiled for all those couples whose lives have been changed because across the sea in the US DOMA has been declared unconstitutional this week. There is always the hope that the planet is after all just a tiny queer village if we make it so, I guess.
I cannot help to feel that while you can travel the world and soak up the beauty and inspiration that is strangely different in every corner of this planet, there are no answers worth looking for that can`t be found right where you are if where you are is home.
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