17. Postcard from the Hoosier State

Where are you from?

Last summer, my roommate’s younger sister came to visit for a few weeks. “Where are you from?” she asked me while she stood at the stove and fried two eggs, the one meal she knew how to make.

“I’m from Indiana,” I responded from the pantry. 

“That’s a half truth,” my roommate’s boyfriend piped up, and I felt myself bristle at the idea that anyone else can define my hometown on my behalf. 

And yet, I’ve been avoiding having to define it for most of my life. I was born in Boston and then spent seven years of my childhood in the Pioneer Valley of Amherst, Massachusetts before my family packed up our minivan and drove to our new home in Bloomington, Indiana. That was the summer of 2004, more than 17 years ago. Cyclical cicadas—The Great Eastern Brood—had emerged in monstrous throngs across Indiana and greater Appalachia, bewildering my 8-year-old self who could only think, What cursed land, swarming with locusts, have you brought me to?

That anger at having been forcibly moved did not dissipate quickly. For years, I harbored a vehement distaste for Indiana and made no secret of this hate to my parents. I did not adjust easily, but I did adjust eventually, surrendering to the truth that we would never go back to Massachusetts. The Hoosier State was not a place I had chosen for myself, but after a certain amount of time had passed, I felt I had to claim that I was “from there.”

But that didn’t mean I had to stay. 

When I went to college on the east coast, I found myself both defending and maligning Indiana in the same breath. I apologized on behalf of my home state, yet sang the praises of the liberal college town where I’d grown up. “Yes, the politics are disgusting, but we went for Obama in ‘08!” I’d chime.

It became a personality tic, almost. I’d identify as a Hoosier when it suited me and abandon it when it felt unflattering.

I clung to the perception of myself as a hearty Midwesterner, able to withstand unpleasant conditions and temperatures. For more than three years living in Boston, I refused to buy an air conditioning unit, claiming that only a few days of the summer were truly unbearable and that I would fare just fine (though the sentiment strikes me as incongruous with my experience when so many buildings in the Midwest are fully air conditioned).

A friend from Ohio observed my AC obstinacy during a horrific New England heat wave last July and said: “It’s a Midwestern thing, the resistance to comfort. I get it. But I’m here to tell you: It’s time.”

For me, it was not time. I held out in the heat while rejecting Midwestern solidarity, claiming that I was dreading an upcoming visit to my backwards home state. But when anyone else assented that it was rich only in corn and soybeans, behind the-times, gun-loving, dressing itself in camouflage and fading into the obsolescence of flyover country, I felt a little flash of heat and my ears reverberated with the words of Janis Ian from Mean Girls: “Hey! That’s only okay when I say it!”

I toed the line between identifying with the Midwest and elevating myself above it, discarding my membership card in search of something better (I’m still not sure what). I’m not proud of that, and some of it is rooted in the self-consciousness I felt upon matriculating to a college where many of my peers had gone to prep school in New York or Massachusetts or California.

I convinced myself that as long as I distanced myself from my home state, I would be palatable to other people; my years spent in Indiana could be an asterisk or a novelty—tangential, but not essential to my identity. But I lived there from age 8 to 18; of course they’re essential.

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I’m back in Boston now, and my younger sister lives with me. She’ll often say, “Remember this person from North?” pointing to a Facebook profile picture of someone we went to high school with. “Remember when this or that or the other thing happened?” And I don’t. I don’t remember their names or who they dated or what instrument they played. I put so much work into forgetting parts of my childhood in agrosuburbia. Beneath soybean plots, I buried memories. I lost contact with classmates. It’s surreal to have my sister resurface these snippets from a past life. 

Of what I do remember, it’s not so much awful, but boring. I kept myself so busy: 7am student council meeting, 8-hour school day, 6 miles at cross country practice, squeeze in 30 minutes of rehearsing tricky clarinet runs for band, scarf down dinner, hours of homework, too little sleep. I did everything and I don’t know how, the elements of my life vibrating against each other at a dog whistle frequency. 

My time was not mine. I believed that was what I had to do to get into college and to “get out” of my town. Being busy made me feel less lonely and distracted me from the fact that I had so few close friends. I had no idea what my classmates did when the last school bell rang at 3:15. 

One day at track practice, our head coach gathered the team in a huddle and said, “People you know are doing drugs and drinking,” and I thought, No, they aren’t. After all, my parents knew where I was every hour of the day; I didn’t need a curfew because I didn’t go out. I got straight As. I never had a drink. I didn’t have sex in the back of cars—or anywhere.

The next week someone brought a water bottle filled with vodka to school and took shots from it during third and fourth period. I began to notice that the bathroom by the band room smelled like cigarettes. Sometimes it smelled like weed (once someone had told me that’s what weed smells like). I’d been convinced that was wrong. That my classmates were wrong. 

Later, I’d find out that the head coach who’d given us that lecture had an affair with an underage teammate a year behind me. She was one of the best sprinters in the state, but she quit running suddenly, and now I know why. They live in Ohio now, have kids of their own together. I’d let him tell me what was right and wrong. 

I’d let everyone tell me every way to be. 

And after a decade of that, I didn’t want it anymore. I didn’t want to be from a place where that man coached kids. Didn’t want to be from a high school with so few windows where we stood for the pledge of allegiance. I wanted to disavow Indiana not because kids took shots during class or smoked in the bathroom or were rumored to have sex in Lower Lot. I wanted to disavow Indiana because, there, my life never felt like mine. 

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On a trip back to Bloomington, Indiana last summer, my mom asked me to go through some of my memorabilia from 3rd to 12th grade. “I don’t want any of it,” I’d said on the phone before I left Boston, “You can throw it away.” But once I got there, I did want it. We found a time capsule and a letter I’d written to myself as a 6th grader. Carefully bound novellas I’d written in elementary school. Hundreds of cross country photos. CDs friends had burned for me. But what she most wanted me to see was a wall collage I’d constructed from paper notes and signs people had given me, mostly through my high school running career. 

There is so much attention in those notes. Care in how I placed and honored them. I mounted them on my wall and left them up. There are many more cards and letters I have kept in boxes, words too tender to discard.

It is easy for me to collapse my Indiana years into an era that didn’t belong to me, time that was only difficult and solitary. It is much harder to acknowledge that those years were also filled with joy, exploration, self-discovery, growth. I lived through those years, and so they are mine. 

Spread across my childhood bedroom wall is evidence of the respect, camaraderie, and love that surrounded me in Indiana. To ignore that feels selfish. To dismiss the ways so many people were there for me, to leave it behind and simply begin again—that feels impossible.

My mom has left my room practically untouched since I graduated high school, a shrine dedicated to a younger self. Even if we packed it all up, threw it all away, those years would still exist. They’re where I’m from.

Fortnightly Faves

1. How Mary Oliver’s Biographer Finally Met the Legendary Poet
   All the women in my family love Mary Oliver with a kind of religious fervor. She led us through the world and made poetry accessible. This piece is short and sweet and introduces the idea of meeting a writer “on the page”; I’d love to know more of you, many of whom are writers yourselves and I hope this space can become more of a community, less of a one-sided monologue.

2. Aziz Ansari: Nightclub Comedian
   Ansari just released a Netflix special and while it has has gotten lukewarm reviews, I kind of loved it. A lot of his quips about social media, government inaction, general apathy resonated. Personally, I don’t always watch comedy to laugh, but to feel things. This set did that for me.

3. Voice notes. I’ve never liked calling people and talking on the phone but I have always loved leaving voicemails and voice notes are a way to do that without anxiously waiting for the line to stop ringing. What a treat to open up my phone and hear someone’s voice, so much more personal than a text. I’m a convert.

4. Imagining Ziggy
   I live for the Personal Histories in the NYer and this one did not disappoint.