I received an interesting reply on Twitter the other day to this piece on NIMBYism, coming back to my hometown, and balancing change with continuity. Tweeted Kate O’Hare, a fellow writer: “The place you loved as a child — you loved it AS A CHILD. Likely, it looked quite different to the adults. No place is ever finished or perfect, and they all began with something new.”

I reached out to her and asked if she’d write up something short expanding on this. It’s an element of what I was writing about, but not something I touched on, exactly. But in the piece, I wrote about how I think a lot of NIMBYism is inertia, or nostalgia for one’s own particular experience of a place. Importantly, it errs not in valuing those memories, but in conflating them with the place itself. And even more in trying to turn nostalgia into policy.

Here’s what O’Hare wrote. Read it, and think about those last two lines in particular.

Context is everything with memories, especially memories of places. How you experience any place has a lot to do with the lens you view it through.

Some people hate where they grew up, others love it. But in both cases, the person experienced it as a child. Whether positive or negative, their view of that home area is very different than that of a working adult, for instance, or a disabled veteran, or a retiree.

I’ve been working on a screenplay about a successful urban attorney who returns for a visit to her mountain hometown, which she dreamed of escaping as an ambitious little girl. To her, it represented limitations and restrictions, both in terms of career and family responsibilities.

There she meets another successful urbanite who fled the city and has found freedom and peace in this very same mountain hamlet, taking pleasure in everything the attorney tossed aside.

She remembers the town as a frustrated child who wanted to be anywhere else. He sees the town as a haven, reminding her that, sometimes, the place you most wanted to escape from is the same place somebody else wants to escape to.

The same is true of a child’s rosy view of a home area, which might look very different if you’re trying to find a job there, raise a family, or pay taxes.

It may be true that you can’t go home again, if only because you can’t go back to who you were then.

Related Reading:

Rural New Mexico Blues

The Essence of Home

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