On Wanderlust and Its Advantages

I have no sense of place. For better or worse, I have no real sense of home, no familial lode star that pulls me back again and again to a place, no single basket in which I’ve placed all my ancestral eggs, so to speak. I have many friends who do feel a sense of rootedness, a clear sense of belonging to a location, and it is something that both bemuses me and fascinates me. These people walk the same streets their grandfathers and grandmothers did and are securely tied to the place that fostered them and their ancestors for generations.

The truth is, my surroundings don’t really affect me too much. I’m happy with a few books, some movies, a bit of recorded music (and some of my own desperate making), and the occasional interesting thought. I’m not sure why I have turned out like this, but I have a few theories as to my lack of rootedness. (Somewhere, there must be a word for this sense of homelessness, but I have never encountered one that really expresses this lack of homing instinct without making it sound like a distinct loss, resulting in sociopathy–a word, for example, like “alienation.”) It could stem from the fact that my parents divorced when I was nine years old, and I was detached from my early home in Brooklyn, New York, and transported overnight to Dallas, Texas, a place I had only gone for insanely hot summer vacations with relatives who welcomed me in their homes. Living in Dallas, among the detritus of a broken family (not to sound overly dramatic), and going to a new school proved to be a very different thing from vacationing there. After three years, we moved again, to Houston–a short trek down I-45, but still one remove from my earliest memories. I found out just how much things change when you go back to visit your old home, and that discovery may be something that is best kept from a ten year old: a few more years might have prepared me better for this realization.

However, I’m pretty sure it was the time I spent as a military dependent that shattered any sense of rootedness I ever had. In six years, we moved about ten times, from base to base, from off-base housing to on-base housing. I got to the point where I didn’t bother to straighten my house, since the moving truck would be by soon enough and leave empty rooms, which are so much easier to clean. My sister told me that her entry for me took up a whole page in her address book (back when people still used such things) with crossed-out addresses.

If this sounds like I’m looking for sympathy, I don’t mean it to. It’s hard to be jealous of something you can’t really fathom. I’ve had the chance to live in a lot of places as a result of my inability to commit to a single place. Moreover, I can see some real detriments to having a sense of rootedness that is so strong it keeps you from exploring the world around you, which is exactly what I’m hoping to do in the next month, as I traipse about Europe in a camper with my husband and a show dog. (We’ve already gotten a bit of practice stateside, so we’re not complete neophytes.) I’ll admit that this sounds like an entirely crazy idea, but I’m up for it, and I hope to record some of the high moments, as well as the low moments, right here. Here’s to a brand new adventure, and to the rootlessness and wanderlust that inspired it.