Leaving the Hometown

I know my class section of coming of age briefly mentioned Alison Bechdel moving away from home, but I feel like it’s a key element in her development, so I’m dedicating this blog post to elaborate on the value of leaving your hometown. The main character wouldn’t have been able to reflect and grow as much if she was still living with Bruce and her mother. Also, they lived in a community with their extended family, and that also makes it hard for someone to change and find their individuality. 

In general, it can be extremely beneficial to leave your hometown because everyone there knows you. Most people you interact with might have known you ever since you were a child, so you unintentionally become reluctant to change because you become afraid of how those people could perceive your “new self”. You think about the version that people know you as, and try to mimic that so that you don’t let your community down for thinking that you changed “for the worse.”

When you’re in a new environment there’s no expectations of how you should act, because the new people you’re surrounded with don’t know you and your personality. If you want to reinvent to rebrand yourself, it’s a lot easier to do that when you move away because it gives you a clean slate. It’s easier to act like yourself, even if you didn’t act this way in your hometown. Another reason why it’s harder to change while living in the town you grew up in, is because you’re often surrounded by childhood friends. People love comparing people to each other, and if you start acting differently than the norm, it’d be really easy to compare you to the people you were raised with. The term “what went wrong” is a common phrase that often describes people who act differently (not that they act bad, it’s just they act different, which makes people uncomfortable). 

Also, when you move away you get exposed to different types of people and different perspectives that people have. For example, in Fun Home, Alison found a gay support group in her college and she probably wouldn’t have found anything like that in her hometown. She was almost shocked that there were other people like her. I think this is important to real life because many times people feel alone, while in reality their feelings are valid and many people are experiencing the same thing, they’re just scared to talk about it because they don’t want people to capitalize on their “loneliness.”