Where are you from?

On: My studies so far, Boyfriends moving houses and me producing an existential crisis out of it

I wrote my first and one out of only two exams this semester. I had a presentation about Harry Potter as a cultural phenonemon last week. I write the essay in my major about how social media and dating apps like tinder change social/romantic behaviour.

Sometimes I feel like my studies aren't even real.

Almost everything seems so interesting and cool. Therefore it's easy to bear some tiny things that annoy me. Overall, I'm happy. I get the feeling that many people, especially many of my fellow students, were disappointed when first arriving at Uni. I guess there are several reasons for this fact.

There exists a majority who hasn't really considered what to do and which studies to start and reflected on it – and just chose something that seemed roughly interesting.

Also, there are people who realize they're different than their former opinion of themselves. It's harder to be one of them because you have to understand that what you always assumed to be true and matching your personality and interests, is instead something very different and doesn't satisfy your wishes and expectations.

In my opinion, stop it! Turn around, take another route! Changing your mind is okay, especially when it comes to life's big choices. Noone expects you to do something you don't love and support. So you shouldn't either.

But don't make this a too easy decision. Think about it wisely and consider your options. But on the other hand – Don't wait too long. In just letting time flow by you avoid deciding altogether and let time make it for you.

In the end, it's comfortable for you to argue, if someone may ask: „Naaah, man it was too late to change, anyway – i was in the fifth semester...“

I hate this kind of attitude. Don't do things out of habitude. I know it can be comforting and agreable and it is part of getting to know a new place, a new city – habitulizing it. A few months ago this place wasn't on my imaginary map at all, now I'm seeing this bus stop almost every day. The church, the stream, the facades of the houses lining along it in late January sunlight.

A friend of mine has been fascinated by first and last times since forever. Seldomly, I'm struck by this, too. When do we ever realize that this is the last, the very last time we see this person or we are at the dinner table in this constellation. When my boyfriend moved houses this weekend - wait what? You have a boyfriend?!! [For anyone with requests like this one, you can read about how it all started here.]

(and shame on me I was hiding in my hometown due to my little bro's birthday and not helping out – insert *monkey hides his eyes emoji* here), was one time when I thought about this again. 

Not only that we change constantly and that our perspective shapes and changes our environment and our perception of it. But also that my ways will completely change. New bike routes to discover, not the habitualized one through beautiful alleys and along the Dreisam. New stations to remember: their timetables, lines and names.

A new appartment, new flat mates. A real living room, a smaller bedroom. Moving can be exhausting and when you are finally there, arrived and lying on your mew bed in your new room, you feel a bit lost and you may text your girlfriend "I could do with a hug now..."

And it occurred to me that I am going to move again, too. That nothing in a student's life is really fixed. That home isn't really home here – nope, rather a place for the next 6 months if I'm lucky (because my landlords are kind of snobby and I reaaaally want to move in a flat share, too).

I guess I'm lucky that I have a place to go that I can truly call „home“. Where my family is, where I've spent 17 years of my life. As I broaden my horizont and meet people that don't have this fixed spot to go back to, I don't know if I should pity or envy them.

If your family expatriates to live in Canada, maybe you just shift home to be there, where your parents and most siblings are. 
And if you don't really have a „real home“, because you moved over 17 times in your 18 years (like a very lovely new person I know) and your parents live seperated in different cities, you just choose one and maybe you convince yourself that it's not that important to have one.

Home, where my thought’s escaping

Home, where my music's playing

Home, where my love lies waiting

Silently for me – Paul Simon

If home is where you loved ones are, home can be spread around in many different places, different countries.

If home is, where the heart is, I'd call Paris my home, at least partly. I never felt such freedom and happiness in another place.

If home can be many places, there is not home in a singular, but homes in a plural.

But somehow we need „a place to start from“ when we start telling our stories, when we emplot our lives to build our identity (*puts on nerd glasses* that's called your „narrative identity“ and is a cultural concept). That's why the question „Where are you from?“ is so important to people. Almost as important as „Where are you going?“

Round my hometown

memories are fresh

round my hometown

ooh the people I've met

are the wonders in my world - Adele

Often, we underestimate the power our „first home“, our hometown, the place we come from, the place or places we were born and raised. We'd say: It's my past. We may neglect our connection to it (never want to come back to it), or on the contrary we will show it and embrace it with pride.

A german musician put into words what I feel about my hometown and my home village, a small place with a popultion of roughly 5000 souls. Because however it is a dumb and lame „Kuhkaff“ as we say here, I still met my best and closest friends there. I still passed a lucky childhood there, found good places, magic places there.

I still kinda hate-love this place. Leaving it behind was a liberation. Going out into the Great Wide World. Moving to a big city, being young (,wild and free).

But in my inner mind I know somehow, I will always come back.

May it be forever or just for a day.