I talk and write extensively about wanting to leave home, as if in some undiscovered Elsewhere, my true Home awaits. But sometimes I’m skeptical of my own existential unease, like any self-aware millennial.

Do I really think I’ll magically find Where I Belong if I travel far and long enough? Jesus, I don’t know. Because my inability to belong feels more like my rejection of the people around me than their failure to accept me. Other people are nice, after all. Maybe this primal, at times unbearable need to be different, to stand out in some way, fitting in and social expectations be damned, precludes a real sense of belonging.

Because when you think about it, belonging demands a subtle humility: the humility to accept and embrace the idea that we are alike, and should totally hang out like all the time. I can’t remember the first or last time I felt that way.

Or, perhaps, as the simplest part of my brain wants to believe, I simply haven’t found my people yet.

We shall see. At least there is this: I’ve seen so little of the world that I have enough of an excuse to keep looking outside for the solution instead of inward for the problem in the years to come.