How to: Shut up and Go Home

Removing the stigma from going backward.

Four years ago

 I called my mom and told her I messed up. I couldn’t afford rent, my two best friends/housemates were both packing their bags, and I needed help. 

She gave me an ultimatum. She said she’d pay the final two months of rent in my housing contract if I came home and helped her fix the house I grew up in. Why did it need fixing? Because she wanted to sell it. 

I agreed against my better judgment. Honestly, I didn’t have much of a choice. It sounded better than being evicted, if only barely. There were countless reasons I didn’t want to go home. First of all, my parents would be there together. My separated parents who could barely hold a phone call had agreed to fix and sell their old house. For a whole summer. Second, my siblings would all be there, and I got my ass in gear once already in high school to prove to them that they could do anything. I showed them that hard work meant a good college meant a good job and so on. 

Well, me returning home felt like betrayal to that idea. I quit my job, had no money, was still sad from a tough break-up, and was otherwise a total failure in my own eyes. 

I conveyed my hesitation to my mom before leaving for the blue hills of my home in Roanoke, VA. You know what she said to me?

Shut up and come home. 

And so I did.

Shut up

Society tells you from a young age that there’s a “good path”. Do well in school. Don’t do drugs. Go to college. Get a “good” job. Never accept a salary less than what you already make. Grind. Have kids. Die. 

Because everything is set up around that, going backward equates to failure. God forbid we aren’t perfect. It’s for this that moving back in with your parents, going home, and the like are met with such societal disdain. It’s practically shoved down our throats as the worst move you can make. Every caricature of a loser in pop culture is portrayed as “living in their parent’s basement” or similar. 

This is the first mistake I made as I went home. I bought into this. I was sure that me going home meant that I was resigning myself to never being good enough. The weird part is that once I admitted I was feeling that way, I felt liberated. Something shifted. I relieved myself of the unattainable pressure of performing this perfect dance that I’d been led to believe was “the path”.

Go Home

This is the hard part. No matter how you feel about your home, you have to be willing to let preconceptions about it fall away.