We went and saw Inside Out, Pixar’s latest film. It was an excellent film, and I’d put it right up there with Toy Story, Up, The Incredibles, and WALL-E in my personal Pixar Hall of Fame. I mentioned on Facebook how it was the fourth movie to make me cry a little, the other three being Toy Story (mainly 3), Up, and WALL-E. Pixar has a magical way of eliciting emotion from their films, and reaffirming my faith in animation being a medium people can tell real stories in, not just use to keep children placated or laugh.

Much of the movie deals with something that is pretty close to me, and that is moving to a new place. I don’t want to spoil the movie plot for folks, but the premise is they move from Minnesota to San Francisco. They are two vastly different places, and I grew up midwest also, a couple of states southeast. When we moved to the northeast shortly before 2000, I remember feeling a sense of intrigue and dread. I had finished my freshman year of high school in the midwest, made a few friends, lost a few friends, and had a girlfriend for a short time. I’ve always been an awkward person, so it felt like a real achievement for me in a period of life where I was stumbling through the transition of being a child to an awkward teen. We had moved before, from one state to another next-door a few years before, but still being in middle school, even with that pre-teen awkwardness, I still managed to recover and made the best of things. But upon coming to the northeast, everything changed for me.

I don’t think it can be effectively understated just how different regions of the United States are. Most people who live outside of the US just think of the US as one big gun-toting, beer-swilling, warmongering culture obsessed over itself during all hours of the day while pretending to give a damn about the rest of the world. In fact, it’s much more nuanced than that, and I did not expect it when moving into my sophomore year. I was picked on for coming from the midwest, picked on for being a nerd, or picked on for any number of other standard teenage reasons. My first year was probably the roughest year of my life, surrounded by no one who would even give me ten seconds to understand who I was or acknowledge my presence.

My guidance counselor saw how rough it was for me to adapt to a new region of the country being the sort of person I was. I think she could see that I was someone who had no trouble talking to people or being friendly, it’s just after so many years of dealing with dullards and bullies, I was very selective about who I interacted with. She suggested I join the school’s audio/visual department. There, I could interact with people who share more of my common interests. It was a bit rough at first, the guy who ran it was a ex-rock’and’roll type in his forties with long hair and an unkempt appearance, but he was surrounded by guys and girls, mostly juniors and seniors, who were there for stage lighting, sound, and effects. Only a couple people were there for the technology side of things, computers, networks, and such. The department ran both stage equipment for shows in the auditorium, and the school’s computers, servers, and networking systems. I had a colorful cast of characters to deal with, including some very nice girls, a mean girl, a couple charismatic guys, and a tech-know-it-all. Together we were Team Dickhead, or Team D for short, and it was probably what saved me from falling further into a pit of despair in unfamiliar territory.

In subsequent years, life improved. I made more friends, mostly students from the Vo-Ag program who came from other towns outside ours. The town I lived in and went to school in was a more affluent town, where most kids had new-ish cars, the kind parents would buy their kids for their birthdays. Me? I got a hand-me-down Chevrolet S-10 truck. I didn’t feel too bad about it, but I earned my fair share of snarky attention from kids with BMWs and Audis. I hung a iMac mouse from the rear-view mirror and paid little attention to the haters. I believe my sort of “poor aura” resonated with a lot of those Vo-Ag students, a lot of my friends, and the clubs I was a part of, had kids from other towns who sort of spoke my language. When I saw language, it’s not to imply that “being poor” or maybe in this case, less rich than the leading kid, was a negative attribute, I feel like it was my midwestern life growing up in a more balanced and mindful region that allowed me to level more easily with kids from other places, most of whom were minorities even. Most people dismiss people who talk about their “token minority friends”, but I grew up treating people the same, and I had minority friends in the midwest too. But maybe what helped me resonate with these people was that I never presented myself as a fake. I never strived to be popular in school, be a jock, or be anything I was not. I could not wait to graduate though, because every day was a struggle among some of the most pretentious people I knew, and thirteen years later, I still haven’t gone to a single reunion.

There were a number of times I wanted to give up. In the first couple years up here, we tried to return back out there for holidays with our family, and two years in a row we were met with terrible weather conditions. Compounded with my parents’ divorce, we stopped going out to visit, and it got harder and harder for me to want to stay up here. After I graduated, I didn’t have very much direction in life. I chose a tech community college to go to because I had no idea what else to do. Often I thought about moving back out to the midwest, living with family, working somewhere, and figuring shit out, but before I knew it I had gotten into a relationship and was enjoying everything again. When that ended, I almost rage-quit this state again, only to get into the relationship that would eventually lead to my current marriage.

The moral of this story? Well, memories are a fragile thing. A lot of my favorite and most cherished memories are from when I was a child, when my days were playing outside, playing inside, playing video games, running around the yard with the dog, super-soaker fights, trips to the pool, and Saturdays at my father’s office. I know all people tend to cite their childhood as being their favorite time, and the naivety of being a child being a chief factor, but if I had to pin down when my overall attitude and emotional base changed, it was making that first move. Not because of my friends, or the school I went to, even that shitty catholic school I went to, but because all of my best memories with my family were in those two houses, in that suburban town outside a major city. It was in the small town where all of my family lived, my grandparents, great-grandparents, cousins, aunts, and uncles. We saw those people every year, even twice a year or more in some cases. After moving, we saw less, and less, and less. Hanging around my wife’s cousins always makes me feel like complete garbage that I missed my own cousins lives for over a decade. I couldn’t even make their high school graduations because I didn’t have the time or money to drive all that way, which while true, also hides the anxiety I felt for not knowing what to say after so long.

I’m not writing this to guilt anyone, especially my parents, because I know it was hard on everyone. We make a lot of internal and external sacrifices for the greater good, and I keep asking myself now if I’d make those same decisions as an adult for my children I hope I’ll have someday, and my conclusion is always the same. I ideally want to stay someplace long enough for them to at least through their most malleable years in one piece. I know that transitional period will still be hell, but at least they will have some stability. I also don’t want to move far away from our family, because I want them to have the sort of experiences I did with my cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents. Job markets can be tough, and what I do makes that even tougher, especially in this state, but I want to make it all work somehow. It might not be perfect, but it will be home.

Memories are really the core of our person, they shape our past, our present, and our future. The most damning thing about them is that they disappear, both in life, and in death. Even those around us who copy our memories within their own, lose them eventually. Sure, some keep diaries, journals, even this website here, but given enough time, those will be lost, and no one will probably ever know anything about the vast majority of us. So memories are pretty important to me, and even though there will be bad ones, sad ones, mad ones, and fad ones, they’re all we have in this short tour of planet Earth, and I intend to make them count, even if it is in front of a computer all day long.