Domestiphobia

Throughout my life, I’ve always felt… a little out-of-place.

A lot out-of-place.

From the time a boy named Jason puked on me after the mile run in 6th grade (I still don’t feel clean), to my bespectacled, brace-faced, promless high school career, to my time spent trying to understand and accept life as a Yankee living in various parts of the South (um, boiled peanuts? really?), feeling out-of-place has actually become my way in the world.  The only way I feel in place.

Make sense?

In fact, I’m not really sure what would happen if one day I woke up and found myself where I’m supposed to be.  Where I feel comfortable.

Probably the last of the loose screws would detach itself from my mind and fall out of my ear and, as I watch it roll-bounce down the pavement toward the vanishing point of existence, the nice young men in their clean white coats would come and take me away to a place where I would never feel comfortable again.

Probably.

But that’s just speculation.

This whole out-of-placeness was only further confirmed in a recent memo from my editor at Re-Nest.  It read (and I paraphrase):

I’m so pleased to welcome five new members [to the team]: Laurie (New York), Alexa (San Francisco), Liana (New York), Julia (Chicago), and Katie (Sanford, North Carolina).

Okay.  Aside from the fact that they all have movie star names while mine is so girl-next-door, notice anything… odd?  I don’t know… something that makes it all too painfully clear that I’m ridiculously out of my element?

I’ll give you a hint.

Maybe — maybe – it’s the fact that I’m the only person whose city needed to be followed by the state name for clarification.

Maybe.

Maybe because Sanford is not really a city, but more like a town with a Waffle House and a Cracker Barrel.

Maybe.

But you know what?

Since feeling out of place makes me feel in place, I’m going to take this as a positive sign.  If I can’t go to the Big City to get a job, I’ll make the Big City job come to me.

I think this could work.

I think I’ve figured out what my problem is.

At least part of it.

And it’s so painfully obvious, I can’t believe I’m only just now coming to this realization over my morning coffee as the pups gnaw away on their bones.

Because this is something that’s been gnawing on my bones for over a year.  Probably longer.  And it’s really not until we get down to the marrow of things that my issues become clear.

My epiphany?

It’s not this place I have a problem with.

Well I do, but that’s not the issue.  The issue is that I’ve been in this place too long.  See, until this place, I hadn’t lived in any one place for more than 2 years for the past 10 years.  Even if I stayed in the same town, I at least changed residences.  Sometimes the moves have been circumstantial.  Sometimes just because I wanted change.  Sometimes because the military made me, once I got married.  Sometimes because adventure awaited.

Then, when we moved to North Carolina, we knew we were going to be here for at least 4 years — a certainty that’s rare in military life.  So we thought we’d take advantage by buying a small home.  A chance to feel a sense of permanence.  Of belonging to a community and calling it “home,” rather than simply a place to rest.

It never occurred to me that I might be bad at it –

That 4 years could pass, I’d open my eyes and realize I’d never even tried.  That I don’t know this place like I should.  I don’t know the people.

Instead, I was counting down.  Wasting 4 years because I wanted to be somewhere else.

Anywhere else.

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I wanted to move, people!  To me, the world becomes alive when we’re forced to change scenes and meet new characters.  Explore different radio stations.  Get lost on unknown streets.  Discover hidden coffee houses and cafes and consignment shops.  Become a stranger in a bar.

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It’s no secret that I love to travel.  And moving is just travel with everything you own.  Which isn’t much, when you move frequently.

But now I have all this stuff.  This stuff I’ve been accumulating for 4 years and I think that every thing that we buy also takes up residence inside my head — a bit of retail space otherwise reserved for calmness and peace gets replaced with “There’s a sale at Bath and Bodyworks?” and “Will I ever be able to find a window treatment to fully cover that bedroom window?”

And now, I’m told, we will be here a while longer.  Two years, maybe a lifetime.

And I know now that I can’t do what I did before.  Before I was just telling myself — consoling myself — saying, Don’t worry.  You’re still young.  You still have plenty of time to figure things out.

And then I blinked.

And I realized…

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And now I really don’t have plenty of time.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you should probably try blinking.

Or not, because then you might realize how much time has passed.  How many birthdays you’ve experienced here with really no one to celebrate.  How many people you spent time not getting to know.  How many southern vinegar barbecue places you haven’t discovered and how many times you haven’t experienced the foreign taste of the word y’all on your tongue.

There were things to do and see, but in your head, you had already moved on.  To someplace better, you thought.  A quaint seaside village in California.  A Mountain town in Colorado.  A northeastern city with ethnic restaurants and fall leaves and lobster rolls.

But that’s no guarantee.

And it hits you, all backhanded and rough, maybe with rings on the knuckles with pointy prongs and solid gemstones, that it’s no guarantee.  That the next place might not be “home,” either.

And then what?

You’ll let another 2 years pass unnoticed?

Unexperienced?

Unloved?

Enough.  I’ve finally figured out that if home is only where the heart is, we might not ever get there.  And that, to me, is unacceptable.

Home is where I make it.

This place has things to offer.  I just need to find them.

How about you?  Whether you’ve lived somewhere 10 months or 10 years, how do you go about keeping the place interesting?

I’m not going to sugar coat it –

Justin and I have had more than our fair share of you got some ‘splainin’ to do moments.

On Justin’s part, they usually involve my discovery of some new piece of schmancy electronic equipment residing in our living room or the amount of money he spent on movie rentals for the month.

On my part, however, the ‘splainin’ has to happen whenever Justin discovers a new disaster area denoting the latest project I started in a frenzy and then gave up on a tenth of the way through.

And I think it’s safe to say that through the course of our marriage…

I’ve had to do way more ‘splainin’ than Justin.

The French have an expression, mal dans sa peau.

To feel bad in one’s skin.

It happens when something — whether it be your career, your home life, or even your behavior, doesn’t seem to reflect the person you want to be.  Or worse, the person you know you really are.

Like someone who never ends sentences with prepositions.  Or overuses fragments.

Just for example.

Remember my letter to myself?  Oh, yes.  I have skeletons in my underwear drawer.

And I would venture to guess that *94% of people who feel this way just learn to live with it.

Discontent and disappointment is a part of life, they say.  Get over it.

Pessimism:

Then there’s about 5%, poor souls, who haphazardly try to make changes here and there, or who wait for signs or divine inspiration to point them in the right direction.

They think a dream is going to wake them in the middle an epiphanal moment and suddenly, out of nowhere, their skin just fits.  Like Jame Gumb sewed a new one just for them.

Custom tailored.

Except not as gross.

The problem here is that we’re people — not snakes.  We can’t just shed our skin when it gets a little itchy or starts to feel confining.  (And those of you yelling, What about microderm abrasion or skin peels, huh?! can just be quiet because you know I’m talking about figurative skin.  Smartasses.)

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So in most cases, waiting for Santa to bring us a new skin suit is futile.  It ain’t gonna happen.  Even if we unzip the one we have, drop it on the beach, and run clear across state — or country — lines, our own skin has a creepy way of stalking us.

And I think this is what that last 1% of people — those mal dans sa peau people — figure out.  The only way skin can be changed, really changed, is slowly and deliberately over time.

Think about it.

I wanted a new career, and it took me over a year to figure out that no one is going to walk up and hand it to me all wrapped up in a pretty blue box with a white ribbon.  And if something like that were to happen, it would most likely be wrapped in a brown paper bag covered in grease stains and secured with duct tape and should, as indicated by the chickenscratched and misspelled address, be approached with extreme caution.

I think I’ll pass.

Which unfortunately means I have to work for it.

Damn.

And if I don’t like the fact that I’ve somehow managed to turn into a tightly-wound stressball at home who can’t stop thinking about how much money I used to make, I can change that, too.

It took me time to get here, but I used to be someone I liked.

I can be her again.  It just takes more time.

So.  The good news is we’re not stuck with the people we’ve become.  If you’re bad in your skin, maybe it is time for a spa treatment.  Sandpaper that shizzle right off and start fresh.  The healing process might be painful.  And it might make you look ugly sometimes.  But if you keep in mind that person you want to be, it’s worth the funny looks you get in the meantime.

“I got a chemical peel.  Is it bad?”

My name is Katie, and, in a nutshell, I’ve gone from waitress, to Geographic Information Specialist and Sustainability Coordinator, to unemployed, back to waitress, and now an underpaid Real Estate and property management assistant who kicks people out of their homes for a living.

I know, right?

W.T.F.

But don’t worry.  It’s all part of the process.

I think.

*All percentages referenced above are 100% concocted from my own imagination.  Do not use them for reports, statistical analyses, or a master’s thesis on anything other than a psychological analysis of people who pull random statistics out of their asses.  In which case I want to be cited.  And let in on the results.