What A Long, Estranged Trip It’s Been
Back in my hometown after 20 years away, I’m finally unpacking my baggage.
“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” — Marcel Proust
Who am I here?
I carry the question with me as I step out the door for a run.
It’s one of those perfect Midwestern days in between summer and fall. A light breeze blows through leafy trees not quite ready to trade in their green for red, orange, or yellow.
My iTunes is set to shuffle. I take my first stride. “Plaguing Me With Insecurities” comes on by Ghosty, an old college crush, one of the best bands to ever come out of the Heartland, in my opinion. I get a lot of messages through music. This one is as timely as ever.
On every road I run down, I’m haunted by the specter of my past.
There’s the park where my high school friends and I’d drink and smoke weed on weekends back in the late 90s.
There’s the intersection where we played that practical joke, which went so well it almost got the cops called on us.
There’s the empty parking lot where my first girlfriend and I would fumble around in the backseat of her 1989 Acura Integra hatchback trying to have sex. Memories bubble up to the surface after decades submerged in the murky depths of my mind.
I keep thinking I might run into a high school classmate or childhood friend, people I haven’t seen in decades. And happily so — because I’d cut ties with Kansas City and its denizens when I graduated from high school.
Nearly 20 years to the day, I’d set off for college in California. I hoped never to return to my hometown.
I was raised in a large Catholic family of six — four boys, two girls — which descended from an even larger Catholic family of 11 on my mom’s side. Large families aren’t that uncommon in the Midwest; neither are those with century-long ties to the area. Chances are you’ll run into someone you know here.
The psychic distance between you and a complete stranger can often be shrunken by asking a few, simple questions:
What’s your last name?
Where did you go to grade school or high school?
They’re the default ice-breaker, the common ground establishing entry point into a conversation. And there’s plenty of common ground here. In fact, a lot of the people you grew up with are still here — they’re your doctors, lawyers, and insurance salesmen.
My grandpa, the founder and CEO of a successful Midwestern chain of banks, was a larger-than-life figure in town. A post-depression-era Irish Catholic from modest means, he blazed a path straight to the top of the business world with a legendary work ethic and plenty of principles to live by. He often liked to share his thoughts on life — little nuggets of wisdom affectionately known as “Byronisms” — with his family and 47 grandchildren. “Did you do the job, or did you do the job well,” is one that sticks out in my mind.
People from the Midwest are modest, even if their bank accounts aren’t. If you have money, you don’t talk about it — that’s tacky. So are ostentatious displays of wealth, like wearing expensive designer clothes or driving a Ferrari around town.
But that doesn’t mean making money isn’t important to Midwesterners. Quite the opposite. As far as my family was concerned, following a path toward financial success was a God-given right. Most of my uncles and one of my aunts went to work for my grandpa, joining him in executive roles at the bank. It’s also pretty common to see siblings working together in family-run businesses. Especially those from close-knit, conservative families like mine.
There was always an outward appearance of excellence to uphold, thanks to my grandpa’s sterling reputation in the community. Everyone loved him. But at home, he kept a hardline control over the family. I have to think his kids felt pressured to join the family business. Around here your family name is your stock-in-trade. So what would other upstanding people in the community think if Byron’s children didn’t join him at the bank?
“Remember your family’s good reputation,” my mom would often say to keep us kids on good behavior. It was a statement seared into my adolescent psyche. Growing up in Kansas City felt like living in a fishbowl. Those who knew my family — there were many — were watching my every move.
I had to get out.
Throughout my 20s and 30s, I viewed KC like a stop-off at a shitty motel on the way from point A to point B: You don’t want to stay long, but at least there’s a bed.
I’d moved out to the West Coast — first to Los Angeles, then several years later to Portland — and adopted the live-and-let-live attitude and provincial smugness of West Coast people. Ironically, many of those I met weren’t even from the West Coast — they were transplants like me.
Kansas City in the early aughts felt much like it was in the 90s: Lacking open minds, creative culture, and innovative urban planning — all things I’d grown accustomed to, but had no part in creating, living out west.
Fuck this backwards cowtown was the arrogant attitude I brought home with every visit. I don’t have time for all the small minds here. My M.O. was bitter negativity, constant shit-talking on KC while idealizing my life out west. Looking back now, I can only imagine how unpleasant I was to be around.
My family even had a name for me: Eeyore, like the comically depressed donkey in the Winnie The Pooh books. Who could blame them? For every positive statement I made there were at least ten that weren’t. So I wore the name well.
But here’s the thing I was yet to discover during all the years of seething resentment for my hometown:
My anger was a proxy for pain.
It was the pain of being the odd man out, the round peg in a square hole, the black sheep of my family. It was the pain of feeling completely out of place in the cookie-cutter community in which I was raised.
I was creative, liberal-leaning in my views, and couldn’t imagine joining the ranks as a banker, doctor, lawyer, insurance salesman, or some other corporate-type, like the well-worn path went for so many around me.
The meaning I derived from this difference was that my views about life were somehow wrong, and the only way I’d be accepted was to abandon my beliefs and follow the crowd. But I couldn’t, it wasn’t my path. Still, I felt alone. In my loneliness, an extremely powerful thought took root and started to grow:
I don’t belong here.
I dragged this psychological ball-and-chain with me, from one experience to the next, from one city to another, for nearly 40 years.
It’s funny how the universe forces you to face unfinished business, though certainly not funny at the time.
In 2002, after two years in Los Angeles studying film production at an upper-crust college, I got busted for a fake ID business I was running out of my dorm room. The raid also turned up my satchel full of drugs — “The Devil’s Handbag” I called it, tongue-in-cheek — and I was promptly arrested. Charges of forgery and illegal drug possession followed.
I got banned from campus, and shortly thereafter received a formal letter with a message from the Dean of Students: I was kicked out of school. My carefully constructed West Coast identity came crashing down. I was forced to return to the Midwest, tail between my legs.
I hated coming home. The pain of losing my identity and leaving L.A. on such depressing terms cratered my self-esteem. I was completely lost. Suicidal even. What saved me was to soldier on and complete my degree, albeit on a very different track.
In late summer, 2005, I received a journalism degree from the University of Kansas after three years in Lawrence, the quintessential college town. It was the kind of college experience I lacked in Los Angeles at the country-club-rich-kid-school I attended. I made new friends. I formed a band. I met many liberal like-minds. In effect, it was the universe smiling down on me, as if to say, See?? The Midwest is NOT such a bad place!
But I still wasn’t convinced I belonged here.
From 2005–2009, Kansas City and I weren’t on speaking terms. In late 2005, I chased my then girlfriend to Oregon in pursuit of a new West Coast chapter. I was guided by a sort of anti-Cheers credo:
I want to go where nobody knows my name.
Once again I was a West Coast person, and I happily gave KC the cold shoulder. It was during this time that a long-standing drug problem got even worse. I could barely work, let alone function. I kept a part-time job and lived a down-and-out lifestyle, even becoming a small-time dealer to fund my habit.
I was miserable again, and I wanted to blame everyone else for how my life had gone so wrong. I could’ve slunk back to KC, admitted defeat, started over. But I was propelled by a poisonous mix of self-loathing and grandiosity, so I wasn’t going to do that.
What started as disdain for my hometown had evolved into full-blown hatred. The gulf between who I was there and who I had become out west had grown so large that I couldn’t imagine living in Kansas City under any circumstance. When I did venture back for the holidays, I spent most of my time sequestered away from family, holed up in my old bedroom, secretively doing drugs by myself. Fuck you, Kansas City was the thought I chased down with a steady stream of tranquilizers, stimulants, and alcohol to numb my pain.
Though I couldn’t see it at the time, my bitter pessimism and self-destructive behavior belied a simple truth:
It wasn’t Kansas City that needed to change, it was me.
The early 2010s brought even more suffering — job losses, the end of a long-term relationship, a three-month stint in rehab — but I won’t get into the long story of it all here. Suffice to say, it was a very hard time.
I chased another girl across the country, this time to Nashville. When our relationship spanning two cities and nearly eight years together fell apart, I packed up my Ford Explorer and drove back out to Portland for a new chapter in an old, familiar city.
Right around this time, my parents’ marriage was also falling apart, and they eventually got divorced. If there was ever any reason to come home, now there really isn’t. The move from Nashville to Portland, purposefully skipping over KC, was life’s equivalent of a common line at last call in a bar:
You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.
I was well aware that there was gossip about my family in certain upper-middle-class social circles of Kansas City. This fueled my hatred for the city even more, because now I had evidence of it being a place where people were petty and judgmental. “She’s x, he’s y”. You’re reduced to whatever’s convenient for someone to believe. It’s the epitome of black-and-white thinking. These small-minded Midwestern people have such a ‘stay in your lane’ mentality. I was consumed with bitter contempt.
So I stayed comfortably away from the mess of it all, taking an out-of-sight, out-of-mind approach. I hunkered down in Portland and told myself I wasn’t part of this family anymore — I’d changed.
Even then, at yet another inflection point, I couldn’t see the writing on the wall:
Kansas City was calling me home, pleading for me to make peace with my past.
“It’s not like I’m doing anything here that I wasn’t doing there,” I said to my Mom, with characteristic, on-brand sarcasm.
“Breathing,” she replied.
We were having lunch at a small cafe in October, 2020, on one of my first days back in Kansas City after deciding to make the move. We sat outside on a glorious early fall day when the humidity had finally relented and the temperature turned mild. I recounted my last days in Portland. Remarkably, my wife and I were able to escape the day before a giant plume of wildfire smoke blanketed the whole city. It was the final event that convinced us it was time for a change.
Just four months earlier, Portland had erupted in protest over George Floyd’s tragic death. For over 100 days straight there were nightly demonstrations by angry protesters, and it wasn’t safe to venture downtown during this time.
We wondered how long the anger would last. Portland had a long history of civil disobedience. Protestors would swallow red, white, and blue-dyed food, then puke it up all over the front of the hotel where Ronald Regan and George Bush stayed on their visits, as well-known writer and former Portland resident, Chuck Palahniuk, detailed in his book Fugitives and Refugees: A Walk Through Portland, Oregon.
But this wasn’t a one-off demonstration. It seemed like there was no end in sight to the nightly violent clashes between citizens and cops.
“I can’t breathe” was the rally cry of angry mobs for months. Then one day in early September, following a series of increasingly out of control wildfires in the vast forests all around Oregon, the universe delivered a literal manifestation of Floyd’s last words, as if to say, “Oh really, you can’t breathe? Well here’s what that’s like!”
We made it out right in the nick of time, literally hours before the thickest smoke moved in. That last week, knowing I was moving, I did my “greatest hits” tour: road runs on my favorite routes through Northeast Portland neighborhoods, and even did a full end-to-end run of the Wildwood Trail in Forest Park. My wife and I ate delicious Lebanese food at Nikolas, sipped cocktails made by street vendors, and got vegan ice cream at Eb & Bean. Then we briefly met up with friends to say our goodbyes. There was a melancholic feel to all of it. I knew our chapter here — my chapter here — had ended.
Portland had been many things to me over the years. It started as that carefree friend that was always down to party, then became the one that cleaned up their act, and, in its last, most authentic version, was the high-on-life exercise enthusiast and outdoorsy dreamer.
Oh wait, that was all me.
Let’s just say the city was supportive of whatever lifestyle I chose. It was always a hands-off, live-and-let-live kind of place. But it had also taken an unfortunate turn for the worse in recent years. There were more urban homeless camps than ever before, the city was dirtier than it had ever been, and the skyrocketing housing costs were driving many long-time residents to sell their homes and search for somewhere cheaper.
I couldn’t afford to live here anymore. I’d also grown tired of waking up to the shirtless schizophrenic guy who wandered my street shouting at the top of his lungs. But my identity was still so intertwined with living here, and moving back to the Midwest threatened my self-image as a full-fledged Oregonian now.
Yet I had to face the music: It was time to move on.
It’s a cold day in late December, 2020, when my wife and I decide to go for a walk around Loose Park, a sprawling urban greenspace near the J.C. Nichols Plaza in Kansas City, Missouri.
I mention a conversation I had with a cousin during a recent family gathering at Christmas. This cousin, a few decades younger, was debating whether or not to go work for an investment bank after graduating college next year. He’s a smart kid, able to do whatever he wants with his life. Though, listening to him, I couldn’t help but think he’s on someone else’s track, and that he’s adopted the status quo mindset handed down from generation to generation in my family. A persistent belief that stable, straight-laced corporate jobs are what to strive for.
“It’s hard for me to connect with this sort of conformist thinking,” I tell my wife. “I still feel so alien around the pervasive groupthink here. I still feel like that round peg in a square hole.”
“It’s not about separation, it’s about integration,” she replies. “You chose to be in this family — you made a soul contract — and there’s a purpose for why you’re a part of it.”
She’s right. Life here in my hometown versus life elsewhere shouldn’t be seen as a point-counterpoint. Instead, everything I’ve experienced has prepared me to come full circle back to where I was raised. It’s all to integrate what I’ve learned out in the world, part of the classic Hero’s Journey that Joseph Campbell spoke of.
While that angry, resentful kid who left back in 2000 still sometimes wants to show up, hardened feelings from back then are softer now, their sharp edges weathered by plenty of humbling experiences.
I now see the city with new eyes — thankfully so. Apparently so do a lot of others because there’s more art than ever, more civic pride, more homegrown products and businesses. There’s even a palpable sense of excitement for what’s coming next, be it the urban streetcar expansion, new commercial development along the riverfront, or — my particular favorite as a runner — new trails to hike, bike, and run in local parks. It’s Chiefs Kingdom, the City of Fountains, the land of jazz and legendary barbecue. That’s who the city was, is, and will continue to be. It’s always been clear.
But who am I in this city? It’s still unclear. Yet I’m okay with that for the first time in my life, because I’m a book that’s writing itself in real time.
And I know I can always write a new chapter in an old place.
