Home

I've been trying to write this blog entry since I arrived back in Canada. For nearly five months I've been redrafting, incapable of pinning down exactly what it is that I've been feeling. I think I might finally have it this time.

During my three years in the UK I put down real roots. I grew up. I became the person I had always wanted to be, and that person, that identity, was at home in the UK. I was over there for a long time... an important time. I invested in people, in organisations, in social structures and cultural norms. I learned how to be an adult there. The place had transformed me enough for it to truly become my home. And then I graduated from university, and I looked at myself and I saw an environmental activist. And I looked at my "home" (my old home, my Canadian home) and I saw the worst development project on earth. I saw the Alberta tar sands, and I knew that I had to come back here to Edmonton to do the activist thing. I mean, if even Albertans can't bring themselves to fight for Alberta, who on earth will? (That's my official story at least. Coming back to Edmonton, difficult as it has been, was also the easy option. You know, with the end of my student visa and my parents being here and all. Lucky for me the circumstances made the noble decision to come back here also the convenient one. But I try not to think about that.)

During my flight from London to Edmonton, somewhere over the atlantic ocean, my conception of "home" got confused, and I lost a part of myself. When I arrived back in Edmonton, everything looked vaguely familiar. Familiar enough that it felt like I should have known where I was, and yet vague enough that I was actually totally lost. It's taken me five months to relearn the city and to get my Edmonton feet back. I knew that moving back across an ocean after three years away would be an adjustment, but the reverse culture shock hit me far harder than I could have imagined. My first day back I was sitting in a cafe waiting for a friend, and a waitress came over to ask if I wanted a drink while I was waiting. When I asked for a cup of tea I was presented with a list of over 15 herbal varieties and I nearly died. I looked up at her dumbstruck. "I just want a cup of tea", I thought. "What do you mean what KIND? I just want tea."

But the culture shock I had to deal with ran deeper than just moving across an ocean and a continent: I also left my home in the counter-culture to return to the normative bourgeois culture I'd spent three years learning to reject. After exploring the squat scene in Amsterdam, and spending time in an autonomous self-sufficient commune in the hills outside Barcelona where I was free to frolic in fields of permaculture, I was hungry for revolution. I spent a summer living the anarchist dream at a protest camp in Iceland where I got to illegally chain myself to things and live in a community run by consensus. Leaving my comfortable downtown apartment in the morning to go to my 9 to 5 job with a product (red) ipod in my pocket and a Starbucks latte in my hand is not surprisingly a significant shock to the system. The question: "who AM I?" is a common train of thought in my head these days.

I'm also, for the first time in my life, not a student anymore. I'm floating around in a post-degree limbo, thankful for the opportunity to define myself as a person rather than a philosophy student, yet holding on to the idea of a post-graduate degree as the only safe and respectable trajectory for my life. During my evening commute home after my 9 to 5 workday, I often feel stagnant. As if the growth and self-discovery of university has ended to make room for the mind-numbing routine of "the real world". Which I know is a bunch of garbage. I know that I'm still learning, still growing, still evolving; I just don't have those new pieces of knowledge highlighted in a textbook to prove that they're there.

The last time I tried to write this blog entry (about two and a half months ago now) I had just found the Edmonton food not bombs group. This is what I wrote then:

"I almost felt at home in Edmonton the other day. The moment was short and fleeting, but it was there - the first of its kind in the two and a half months that I've been here. As I opened the door to the housing co-op two of my new friends live in, I was met with the sight of large cardboard boxes overflowing with fruit and veg past it's sell by date, and an aroma that can only be described as "vegan". In that brief moment I was transported back to a place where I knew who I was and what I was doing with my life. I belonged. The cell phone plans here in Canada baffle me. My refrigerator is as big as my closet. My feet are suddenly two sizes bigger, my waist two sizes smaller. And there are actually pictures of beavers, moose, and children playing hockey on my money. But standing outside the downtown library sharing vegan curry and eating stale cinnamon buns? That feels normal."

I thought then that I was on to something. That I'd found something like home in this city. A place where I could put down roots again. I realized soon after, however, that rather than finding a new home in Edmonton all I'd done was found something that reminded me of the home I'd left behind.

When I decided to come back to Edmonton I told myself that I'd give it a year. I signed a year long lease on an apartment, and I promised to give the city a chance. If at the end of that year there was still nothing that made me want to stay here, I'd leave again. But for at least a year, I'd really try to make it my home. Over new years I went to Illinois for a week to visit a friend from university. While I was there I realized that I hadn't really been trying. I had already decided that Edmonton wasn't going to cut it, and I had put an expiration date on my time here. Which meant that I wasn't allowing myself to invest any energy in anything. I didn't believe that I'd be here long enough to see any projects through to the end, or to commit to any of the new friendships I'd made. I had been here for four months, but I hadn't really BEEN HERE. When I returned from my trip I decided that the only way to actually give Edmonton a chance was to operate under the assumption that I am going to be here for a while. Longer than a year. Indefinitely even. And for the past month that seems to have been working. I've been investing in projects, in people, in the idea of a life in Edmonton. I've been putting down roots. I have finally been putting down roots in Edmonton.

Or so I thought until the beginning of this week. I've been seeing someone for the last couple months, and what I realized this week is that I've been putting down roots in him, not in Edmonton. He's been my home, my anchor. But that's not fair on him, and it's not healthy for me. I'm beginning to think that maybe for the time being, I just need to learn to live without roots. Because I can't put them down here. Edmonton is not my home anymore, and I don't want it to be. There are things I need to do here, yes. I know that I need to be here for the next few years. But that doesn't mean I need to identify as an Edmontonian. I'm Canadian, maybe even Albertan, but I stopped being an Edmontonian when I was eighteen, and I have no desire to return to that identity. I feel most comfortable skating on the surface of this city, navigating the line between native and outsider. And that's how I intend to go on.

A few months ago the Indian man who runs the Mexican take-away I often go to for lunch asked me if I was from Europe. I said yes.