Location and Identification

This summer was big, nah who am I kidding? IT WAS HUGE! I moved from my beloved state of California to the south. :/ The place I had heard stories of my entire life. That place where they speak English, but it sounds funny. The place where people are nice, but only to your face. The place where everyone goes to church, but that doesn't mean they're good people. The place where everything is sweet or fried or meat. The place where the girls are southern belles, and the boys are hat and boot wearing boys raised by anti-independent-women dads.

Yes. I know this makes me seem terrible, but this is what I knew of the south growing up. It's the stereotypes I was taught never having been to the south myself.

I've lived off and on in South Carolina for two years while attending college, but it's a university town, and I wasn't quite prepared to be totally immersed in the Southern culture.

So when I went home in May and found out that moving was in the works I freaked out!

I made it through . . . barely.

My friends in SC now have nicknamed me Cali'bama. I originally hated it, but it's kind of catchy and it helps explain myself to new folks (what the Southerners call a group of peeps).

Learning to live in a new world with new fashion and new lingo and new restaurants, etc. has been quite the experience. Sure I've lived in SC for two years with many southern friends but I never took seriously to adopting the southern ways because after all I was a Cali kid. I wasn't planning on sticking around. But now, boy have the tables turned. Not only do I have to understand these strange ways, but I must find substitutes for all my West Coast faves (In N Out, Peet's Coffee and Tea, KOIT, Dutch Bros. Coffee, the slang, the NorCal lifestyle, etc.)

I've felt lost. I'm still trying to figure out where I belong. I don't feel I can call Alabama home, but is California home if I don't live there? When people ask for introductions I never know where to say I'm from. I see someone in a Cali hoodie and I comment on it, but as soon as they ask where I live I feel awkward. I haven't yet made friends in Alabama, but as hard as I try it's so difficult to keep in touch with my old friends from CA. I don't count my parent's new church as mine because I've only been there once and know no one, but I don't belong to a church here in SC yet either.

The thing is, where I am from doesn't define me. I know that, but some days it's so hard to admit to myself. Who I am: my personality defines me, and that shouldn't change depending on where I live.