I’d never felt comfort at the idea of visiting home. I’ve never thought of the holiday season as anything but overstimulation and performative joy, and I’ve never longed to return to the days of summer break.

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Nostalgia does not wrap me in a warm blanket with fond memories of carefree days and the comfort of blissful ignorance. Nostalgia zaps my nervous system like a botched move in a game of Operation. Nintendo theme songs and live studio audiences underscore the melancholy clouding me whenever I’m asked what I enjoyed doing as a kid. I’m skipping through Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) as I write this because certain songs are reopening wounds that I never let heal properly. 

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What I enjoyed doing as a kid was spending late hours of the night alone on my pile of stuffed animals thinking about my day and the people in it. Dissecting each word that was said, the people who said them, and deciding what I needed to do tomorrow that would earn me a more esteemed place in the unspoken hierarchy of adolescent friendships. I never cracked the code, and I never understood why it was so difficult for me to do so until the pandemic forced us into collective loneliness. During that time, I learned how autism manifests in those assigned female at birth and deigned “high-functioning,” and that it may, in fact, explain everything.

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But, of course, there was a time between those late nights spent alone in grade school and now: an adult with a terminal degree in the field that brought me the greatest sense of purpose, comfort, and friendship in my teenage years.

 

What they say about the theatre kids is painfully— and beautifully— true. We were weird, and funny, and intensely passionate. We were hyperactive, and hyper-fixated on our art as much as each other. We were competitive, and peculiarly bonded with authority figures. We crafted an inexplicably intricate web of friends, enemies, lovers, and everything in between.

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(I’d never go back to high school, but I would be a liar if I said I didn’t feel a little bit nostalgic for the manic energy of opening night of my last high school play.)

 

Without really knowing it, the roots of ourselves found each other under the surface, growing into the trunk of adolescence together. We all took so much pride in winning speech competitions, but still lacked the vocabulary to describe precisely what it was that bound us so tightly together.

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I remember being about 14, waving off my mother’s attempts at making friends for me, saying that I wasn’t interested in making friends outside the theatre department. My mom called me a snob— and maybe she was right— but my heart aches now that she couldn’t hear what I was really trying to say; That I didn’t know how to make friends I wasn’t forced into constant, close proximity with. That I couldn’t connect with my neuro-typical classmates who didn’t feel that same, deep sense of strangeness, that inner sense of knowing that something was different and maybe even wrong about me. I couldn’t tell her that I didn’t belong anywhere but in the auditorium, where a dozen other kids were waiting to shed our masks and pretend to be someone else for a few hours.

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The drama club at your high school attracted the “weird kids” because it felt like the only thing we could do to sort out our confusing experiences of queerness and neuro-divergence. We bonded over our love of Sondheim, opening night celebrations at the diner, and insane cast party traditions. More than that, theatre helped us make sense of the world and the people around us, understanding on some instinctual level that we were rooted in our feelings of other-ness.

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The branches we find ourselves growing into in adulthood have become a fractal pattern of a hundred different prospects of what we’ll all become. What I’m grappling with these days is the idea that maybe the thing that kept me grounded to the earth growing up can be just that, and it is not something I need to continue holding onto now that I’ve uncovered a far more comforting sense of self and purpose in my adult life. If you had told my 16 year old self that she would be the only one among her high school classmates to get an MFA in theatre and one of a few who went on to do theatre professionally at all, she’d be so smug about it. At 25, I’m simply jealous that they all figured out before I did that we were allowed to grow our own branches from the same tree.

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I don’t believe in having any regrets in my life. Life always works out exactly as it’s meant to, and nothing that’s right for me will ever pass me by. I don’t regret going to grad school for theatre, but I do regret that my decision to do so came from a mindset of scarcity and urgency I had no reason to feel.

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I’ve officially decided I’m leaving Memphis at the end of the month. Where I’m going next exactly remains to be seen, but I’ve had to come to terms with the fact that my next step might just be moving back to Iowa to live with my parents and save money for a few months. What I’m not going to do is view that as a moral failing or a blanket statement on my artistic abilities, but as an opportunity to reconnect to my hometown, reclaim my teenage years, and recuperate after a few years of questionable financial choices (I’m referring to my graduate degree in theatre of course). 

 

Even just a few months ago, the thought of returning to my hometown for even a few days would have sent me spiraling. Now, I’m approaching it with a sense of curiosity. I have a renewed hope that experiencing my hometown with the self-assurance and pride in all my intersecting identities might be the very thing I need to grow the branches, and leaves, and flowers, and fruits of my creativity in ways I had always dreamed, but never believed I’d actually do.

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It’s interesting to me that I never described myself as an “artist” until the end of my undergraduate career, when that might have been the simplest, and most honest way to understand myself this whole time.