To my readers:

I’m still here.

And I’ve left home again. Been doing that a lot these days. Plenty of reasons why. One’s because I feel like at 24 it’s about time I quit looking for purpose by grabbing hold of other people’s lives and start looking to create some inertia of my own.

It’s taken me time, but I’m learning that strictly vicarious living isn’t the direction to go. You can learn a lot by syncing yourself with the speed and direction another person has chosen for their own life — empathy for one — but you can’t stay at that speed forever, going towards someone else’s goal, following always. The very real danger is that you’ll become them. In thought, action, manner, appearance, the whole of it.

No you anymore.

It’s like playing a doubles tennis match. It’s helpful to watch how your partner moves, how they strike the ball — learning by imitation is part of our genetic heritage after all — but as you’ll soon discover it has its limitations.

First, if you resort to mimicry your own strengths are downplayed. If you imitate, you’ll never hit the ball as well as your partner does. Your body, your muscles are different in innumerable, subtle ways. Secondly, and this is the kicker, if you copy them exactly — which is what so many of us with passive tendencies do — you remove yourself from the direct experience. If you stick to your partner like a shadow as they move to each new spot on the court you’ll never touch the ball yourself, and at the end you’ll walk away with only a secondhand account of the game.

This applies to life as well. If you only trust yourself to take a step after someone else has shown you how, you’re teaching yourself the opposite of self-reliance: dependence. And that’s a fearful thing.

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So I guess you could say I left home because riding coattails isn’t a habit I intend to allow myself to pick up.

And where does that leave things?

Well, I left Birmingham on July 23rd with a hack-and-slash skeleton of a plan. The whole of it amounts to driving cross country to programming school in Seattle through December. After that it’s ellipses ad infinitum (something I like to call “preplanned uncertainty”).

So far I’ve made it around 1,000 miles by car. And there’s no certainty as to where I’ll be tomorrow either, but I’ve got a lot of sky and cash enough for gas and time enough in the day to spend the minutes refining my ethereal goo — that stuff you call “ideas” — into tangible goals.

That’s where I’m at on the existential gps, but if you’re interested in where I’m at as per latitude-longitude within the lumpy borders of the North American continent please, read on.

The first 1,000 miles of progress have been east (the wrong way, but for the right reasons).

To North Carolina to visit good friends and drink Prosecco and wrestle with a dog that used to traipse wooded trails with me.

Then to Washington DC for a bout in a big city full to the brim with young people well versed in the political drama of now. My sister is one of them. She’s got a place her own and a mind to match and good friends atop it all. Proud to see her so determined to build a life.

Two hours to Delaware. To see an aunt and uncle with no kids of their own but who have always been there for me. The time I spent with them was enough to imprint on me that two people don’t need a child to be parents only empathy in the face of vulnerability, love in response to weakness. Intangibles we should all work towards.

Then a short skip over to the retirement home where my grandparents now live. Their first question: “Would you like to spend the night?” Of course. After dinner with another uncle, my other lovely aunt, and their son, my cousin, the nursing-home foldout cot was a dream. Next morning at breakfast I was introduced to my grandparents’ friends, the white-haired, bushy eyebrowed denizens of the Crosslands community — who I suspect were all millionaires and unsung heroes in their younger days —  and the visit was complete.

After which loomed a twelve hour back-breaker to Nashville for a night with longtime family friends, a hot shower, and a bed fitted with giraffe sheets in a room I remember well. Odd to feel like a kid again staring up through those familiar skylights after so long away from home. And a great, aching reassurance to see the same trees I grew up beneath arcing over those windows, waving lightly, talking quietly to the night. They remind me that I lived here once.   

I’m grateful for that.

— Nomad