On growing up in a small town…

This is the google earth shot of the house I grew up in. I have never been back, but writing this post stirred up all the feels, and I couldn’t help but peek backwards. Just to see.

I grew up in a town with a four-digit population sign.

If you’ve never lived in a small town – or should I say a town that small, I always snicker when someone says they grew up in a “small town” population 80,000 or 120,000 – then you can’t really know what it means.

Especially when I tell someone where, if they know it or they’ve driven through it, they often first claim it’s beauty. Oh, it’s so pretty! Oh it’s such wild country! Or if they don’t know it – Oh that must have been nice as a kid!

No, not really. Not when you are someone who isn’t built for that. Let me be clear – I know my experience is by no means universal. I know there are many people who grew up in small towns, even who grew up in my small town, and who love it. Who feel safe, who like knowing the people around them, who feel settled and comfortable in the parameters of friends and family close and slow change. Honestly, I am so glad for these people, because the world would be really uninteresting if everyone lived in cities (and especially in BC, most of our resource production happens in small towns, so they are truly vital to our existence. Thank you, small towns and all of you who live there, for being the backbone of our economy).

Growing up in a place with no traffic lights, no fast-food restaurants, no movie theaters, no clothing stores, one grocery store – things people take for granted just didn’t exist for me. Our dentist, optometrist, any specialist doctors we needed to see – they were all at least a two-hour drive away. Yes, I could play outside in my neighbourhood safely but there were only a handful of other kids who lived on our street and only one who was close in age to me (and she only moved there in grade 4).

But the mountains! They’re beautiful! Maybe, unless you live in them every day and then they feel more like a prison. Big walls, keeping you in and keeping the sunlight out. No sunsets, not really when the sun would disappear over the mountain hours before it actually set – and in the winter, dark so early and light so late. Everything was always dry, sagebrush and dust. Cactuses. Tumbleweeds. It was like a real-life old-timey western, only without the gunslinging.

Mostly, gossip slinging. Ideals of who people should be pressed overtop of who they were, the distance between those two as a ruler to judge that which wasn’t understood. I look back now on side conversations that I heard my parents having with a new lens, as an adult – seeing the ways in which people pretended or hid who they really were. Or tried to, at least. The choices we made as a family because it was the “right” thing to do. Because everyone else was. Because it was expected.

I longed for more, I longed to be able to shop for clothes and books, to go watch a movie, to order something exotic to eat simply because it was possible. I longed to be able to go to a mall – do you know what it’s like to be in grade 8 and have no mall to go hang out at? I longed to have a big enough circle of friends that I would be able to choose – really choose – who to share my secrets with, rather than simply the default friendship of the girls my age. Again – I am not saying I didn’t forage great friendships or get the clothes I wanted on our trips out of town. But there was so much I felt just unfolded by default around me. To me, that was suffocating.

When I first moved out, it was into residence at university. Not exactly a microcosm of what real life is like – but with my own car, I truly had the freedom to choose. I didn’t have the money for all the things I longed for as a child, but what I did have was the ability to reinvent myself. And I really took advantage of that, probably at least three times between 18-23. It was like I had been given a magic wand, and I had some of the craziest and most fun days of my life. I made soul-friends, people who know me better than I even know myself some days. I changed my image multiple times, I lived downtown and went out every single weekend. I soaked up every new experience I could.

I was made to live in the city. I did learn after a short stint living in Toronto that not just any city will do – it has to have an ocean. It has to have a lot of green space. I still love and crave my time in the big trees that grow by the water (when you grow up in a desert, the green is also pretty remarkable). But the speed, the noise, the constant stream of people, and the sheer magnitude of choice – from book stores to restaurants – never gets old for me.

To this day, going to a movie is special. (I kept the ticket stubs from every movie I ever went to until I was about 21. It was that big of a deal to me.)

To this day, when I walk down a new street – either in Vancouver, or somewhere new – and recognize no one, there is still a little thrill.

To this day, going to a play, or out for drinks to a new, hip place (oh man, I cannot wait to do that again!!), going to an adult dinner date with my husband or even just being able to take my kid for fast food? All of these things still shine with a magic, with a magnetism, that I will never tire of.

I was made for a place with a seven-digit population sign.