Leaving Was The Dream, Staying Was The Lesson

what it means to move home at 30

If you had told twenty-year-old me that I would be returning to my family home in my first year of being thirty, I would have called you insane. I would have asked you to be committed—specifically because, from ages 13 to 25, I had been manifesting the exact opposite: getting the fuck out of my home state, maybe even my home country. I spent nearly a decade and some change getting out of debt, earning my degree, and building a résumé that would get me hired somewhere far, far away from my hometown.

I simply wouldn’t have believed you. It would have been unfathomable that my fiancé, our three cats, and I would be cramming our bodies into the bed my eldest brother commissioned for my mother—while she slept on the living room couch. That version of me would have seen this as a failure, even if it was only temporary. Even if it was happening so that I could move into something bigger and better. Even if it was, ultimately, just preparation for the future.

So much of what’s happening in my life right now reminds me of those Lifetime movies where the prodigal child returns to their small town, only to rediscover what made them who they are—and why they wanted to leave in the first place. A movie that forces them to do their shadow work so they can find happiness again. The only problem is that this isn’t a movie. This is my life. This is how I live every day.

Maybe it’s my astrocartography, placing me at the convergence of my Venus and Neptune lines—an infamously sticky placement where life feels like a fever dream, and escape is always just out of reach. Or maybe it’s the fact that my hometown’s roadways form a giant spiderweb, an ominous little detail that feels like a metaphor for how people get stuck here. A place you can’t leave.