… are here right now.

So I was on my way between apartment and bus stop when my thoughts turned to how, when I was a kid living back home, the residents of my beloved home town of Summerside only needed to dial four digits in order to make a connection. In my earliest memories, our phone numbers was simply 5849. We had considerably less than 10,000 residents, and so we didn’t need any more numbers than that.

Trust me, the math works out.

And as I pondered this ancient fact, my mind suddenly seized upon the phrase “back home” and I realized, on a very deep emotional level, that Summerside isn’t my home any more. I am not on vacation. This life of mine is not a temporary diversion on the road back home. I am home.

With this came the realization that I had never really reconciled myself to the idea of a “new home”. On that same deep level, the concept “home” still meant Summerside. The only update my concept of “home” had gotten in the last 20 years was the small change forced on me when my parents sold my childhood home (with all my stuff in it… I am still angry about that) and then I only updated it to mean the house my mother lives in now (with my brother), which happens to be her childhood home.

So she didn’t lose hers to strangers.

But here’s the thing. I don’t live there any more. And I am highly unlikely to return any time soon. To continue to think of it as “home” is not just absurd, it’s self-destructive. I can’t live my life with one foot in the past. That can only split my energies and keep me from fully engaging in the present. And like it or not, the present is the only place you will ever live. I will be far better off focusing all my energies and intentions on the present and the future, two things over which I have some power.

This is a huge psychological shift for me, however. So it will not happen overnight. The concept of “home” looms large in my mind, as it does for any agoraphobic, I assume. In my life, home meant safety and comfort and a certain kind of order and predictability. I could relax at home, especially in my room. I could control my stimulus levels. I could feed my mind. I could be myself.

My home life wasn’t always a happy one when I was a kid, but it was a damned sight better than being Outside.

So to move to fully embrace my life now as “home” is a very big shift. And I can feel part of me resisting because it thinks my current life is somehow “not as good” as my previous “home” in Summerside, and it is not entirely wrong.

But mostly what made my childhood home “better” than what I have now was the childhood part, and I left that behind a long time ago. That’s another reason to shift my concept of “home” – it is vitally important to my quest to finally grow the hell up.

As long as a certain part of me thinks of all this as some kind of temporary thing, like I am just enduring it till I can go “home”, there is no way for me to move forward. And forward motion is vitally important to me. To me, there is only growth and death. Stagnation is not acceptable. Stagnation is death. Growth is life.

So this is it. I am pulling up stakes and moving into the GVRD for reals. Goodbye Summerside! You will always have a place in my heart – and not just because my mother and brother are there – but you are behind me now, and you can’t move forward while looking backward.

Not without bumping into stuff a lot.

Part of this process of detachment and putting down new roots is my giving up on thinking of myself as an Islander in Vancouver. That’s not a useful binary. I am a Vancouverite (subcategory Richmondonian) and this is now my home turf. I live here now, and I am not planning on moving unless I can’t get work in Vancouver.

Someone around here must need a brilliant and talented writer who’s been around the block a few hundred times, right?

Ideally, I would get the sort of work that can be done entirely online and therefore can be done anywhere. I would love to have that sort of freedom. If it paid well enough, I would do it while traveling.

But my preferred destination is TV Comedy, and I get the feeling that the writer’s room is king there, and I am pretty sure that requires people to be in the same place at the same time. Skype or Facetime or the like just would not be the same. So I doubt my work will be portable any time soon.

So this is my home, not just where I live. Suddenly, I actually care about municipal politics. My lack of truly letting go of Summerside goes a long way towards explaining why I found it so hard to care about municipal or provincial politics until now.

What did I care? They had nothing to do with home.

This realization of where my home truly is only reinforces my desire to be more of a part of things. Today I was sitting in the little memorial park across the street from VFS and all around me, happy excited people were getting ready for a weekend of Pride and fireworks and fun.

And I had to ask myself, why aren’t I? Why can’t I be the sort of person who goes out and does fun stuff? Sure, I have my physical limitations, but those can be worked around. I could easily be one of those people oohing and aahing over the fireworks if I really wanted to do it. It is within my means and within my powers.

But I don’t feel like I can, nevertheless.

Too far from my comfort zone, I guess.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.