lovaliss's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -root-less I have been thinking a lot these past couple of days about "home". I feel troubled over it and I think I might understand why. I come from a small town. Everybody knows everything and everything you do is watched very closely and carefully and people comment on it. You grow up learning to care a lot about what people will say or think of you because you're taught (not through words) that no action goes unnoticed or without reprimand or praise. My great great grandparents helped settle my town and clear down to my parents they have all been born and raised there. There is a huge pride for Star Valley...the people there believe it is special beyond any other place...a place that God has blessed them with where everything is beautiful, and there are good and faithful Saints (It's probably 90% LDS). My parents also love the Valley and would never want to leave there. There is a high expectation for everyone...they expect you to always be the best, to be known as a hard worker and an honest person. Everyone "knows" in the Valley that as the missionaries go out that the mission presidents love when they see on the papers that they're getting an elder or sister from Star Valley, that's supposed to mean that they can be counted on to be obedient and a hard worker. Whether or not this is always true it is the belief among everyone. My parents are good examples of the Valley's finest. They are hard workers, they are sooo compeletely honest, they are extremely obedient and humble in every sense, they are wonderful people who live modest lives although they've never done anything that great in the world's eyes, and in fact they go extremely unnoticed in any professional world. They're uneducated, seemingly unimportant, but nonetheless such good people. Everyone seems to leave the Valley, and then return because they love it so much. I don't love it that much. In fact I don't feel I have any connection to there at all anymore, but I wish I did. This is a very lonely position for me to be in and it might seem peculiar for it to be such a big deal if you didn't understand the stigma that is attatched. I feel lost from my past. And that creates this emptiness inside that sometimes catches me. I "grew up" in this place that I should love so much and there is nothing that attaches then and now. The people I might have once loved and felt connected to provide me with nothing but an echo. I don't feel like I have a place to call home and that makes me sad. Some people might not care, but I do care. I crave roots, but feel like there aren't any. I sat down today and thought to myself, "Alissa you do love it there, you love lots of people there, make a list of all the people that have affected your life and that you have love for." I came up with five people outside of my family. That's not a lot for 18 years. Maybe what saddens me the most is that I see there is nothing that connects me now to what used to be, and this presents that my now will once become a then, and there will be nothing to connect me to that either. It makes me feel as if I will just continue to float from stage to stage of my life and never be able to overlap any of these. I always feel this foreboding emptiness inside and I am constantly trying to fill the void. It's not a spiritual thing either, it's an emptiness that deals with humans and interaction and love. Some psychologist call it codependency. I'm not sure what to call it. But "home" feels empty now too and it feels like everything in my life is being swallowed by this emptiness, and if it hasn't yet then it will be soon and it's only a matter of time before the things that I love and care about become obsolete and lost... 2:30 p.m. - 2005-05-03 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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