Where Do I Belong? What Do I Own?
At what point do you finally become “from” the place where you live?
I have lived in Pittsburgh since 2018, but I still hesitate to say I am “from” Pittsburgh, or that I am “a Pittsburgher.” At what point do you become “from” the place where you live?
I think about this fairly often—less and less often with time—but I started thinking about it again the other day when PublicSource, a Pittsburgh journalism website, published a personal essay by someone who moved to the city from Washington State (based on vibes gleaned through social media, apparently) and claimed to be so disappointed with Pittsburgh and the city’s inability to support her that she moved back to the Pacific Northwest after a mere eight months. On the one hand, many of her complaints about Pittsburgh are valid (e.g., the poor public transit), but most of her grievances seem petty, ubiquitous, and/or like the type of thing someone who did actual research on a city prior to relocating would be aware of (e.g., the fact that Pittsburgh has hills).
The author of the essay was properly dragged by Pittsburghers on Instagram (and some readers from beyond, in solidarity), and I maintain that eight months is not enough time to get acclimated to a new place and still insist it’s the city’s fault that you left. At the same time, her entitlement makes me wonder if, after six years, I should have more of a sense of ownership over this city. But what does “ownership” even mean?
I didn’t intend to live here for more than a year. In 2017, after graduating with my MA from Ohio University in southeastern Ohio, I was feeling goalless and vaporlike, not really knowing what to do with myself without the structure of academia. Most of my classmates had moved away, since there really wasn’t much to do in Athens if you weren’t in school. I hung around town as an adjunct for a couple semesters, until a friend from class—a Pittsburgher—said, “Let’s move to Pittsburgh for a year together, have fun, and then go back to school.”
I think I expected to feel a little more like someone on vacation, or someone on an adventure, for that first year. Instead I felt desperate and unmoored. Not knowing anyone but the friend I’d moved with (who I didn’t know all that well), I was embarrassingly lonely. Unlike in grad school, where I was one in a horde of newcomers, I perceived everyone I met in Pittsburgh that first year as already established, their social lives full to the brim. I had a hard time connecting with people, believing nobody needed me to connect with them. I drank a lot and smoked a lot and broke up with my long-distance boyfriend and watched lots of Broad City and pretended I was friends with Abbi and Ilana. Most of the relationships I did form that year felt shallow and temporary; a few were deeply self-destructive.
Still, as time passed, I gradually—and with much effort—got better at meeting people, expanding my social circle, feeling my way around my new city as if for a light in the dark. While my roommate dutifully left after that first year to pursue her PhD, I didn’t get into any of the creative writing MFA programs I’d applied for, so I stayed in Pittsburgh, aimlessly working in art galleries and a used bookstore, ambivalent about whether I should leave after all: Isn’t one place as good as another? Isn’t Pittsburgh a good place to accidentally end up? Let’s be honest, isn’t school…kind of a joke?
Pittsburgh wasn’t where I expected to land—I’d assumed I’d move around more before settling down somewhere—but then again, it did have everything I wanted: a vibrant arts and literary community, only a couple of hours away from my parents, relatively affordable. So, I continued to hone my writing craft and become more entrenched in the town I was living in, simply by being here, day after day, and discovering new people and things to learn about and love and appreciate.
By early 2020, I had been accepted into five or six MFA programs, and I had just begun dating someone new—born and raised in Carnegie—and I was unsure of where things would or could go if I left town. I was leaning towards the University of Alabama, and I started imagining myself as an Alabamian, which was hard to do. I didn’t feel like a Pittsburgher yet, but the idea of starting over from scratch somewhere else gave me heart palpitations. I wasn’t sure if Pittsburgh just wasn’t for me, or if it just took this long to get used to a place, or for me to get used to a place, in which case, why would I want to start over somewhere else?
Then lockdown happened, and I began to think maybe I would be here forever—not with any particular excitement or disappointment, but with a sense of relief that the decision had been made for me, as if I don’t play any role in my destiny, as if standing still isn’t a choice.
Of course, I wasn’t standing still, even if I felt like I was: I was doing things, growing as an artist and a writer, growing my Pittsburgh network, making connections, developing favorite spots in town, cultivating awareness of local issues, investing my time and energy and love. But I still only felt like a Pittsburgher in the vaguest of ways. Maybe this is a personality trait: I can feel passionately about things, but I am also shy and slow to cling, slow to claim.
I made friends with newcomers to Pittsburgh and they seemed to adopt the label of “Pittsburgher” fairly quickly and easily, and I felt a bit of resentment toward them. I didn’t feel comfortable calling myself a Pittsburgher so I felt confident that they couldn’t be Pittsburghers yet either—but somewhere behind the confidence lurked doubt: Maybe they’re more Pittsburgh than me, somehow. Why do I feel so behind everyone, all the time? Why do I feel like I’m standing on the edge of things? What am I waiting for? What does it mean to be a “[insert place]-er” anyway? And is there a difference between being a Pittsburgher and being an anywhere-else-er? Are some people natural Pittsburghers?
I am from a small town in Northeast Ohio, and I feel connected to my hometown only in a dreamlike way. Most childhood connections are dreamy, I suppose. But our home itself was also dreamy, in a neutral sense.
Our neighborhood was what I call “sur-rural”: there were houses, but spread far apart, in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by cornfields and forests. It was the perfect environment for dreaming and creating worlds in your head, and you could belong to those worlds and you could own them.
Growing up, if you wanted to go somewhere in my hometown, you’d go to a friend’s house, maybe, but more often you’d take a walk, past miles of cornfields and trees. There was really nowhere to walk to. The nearest “third spaces” were at least several miles away, often many more. The only friend from grade school I’m still in touch with no longer lives there, and I’m not in touch with anyone I went to college with in Akron, so there’s really nobody to reconnect with outside of my family when I return home.
It’s true that the layout of my rural hometown is very different from Pittsburgh. But I still think of my time there as a missed opportunity, in some ways: while living there, I never made efforts to entrench myself in my community, not really. We went to church a few towns over, but my family was otherwise somewhat insular, and I grew up with the sense that connections I had to friends and my community generally were less important—less permanent, by nature—than my connection to my family, and that connections only happened organically; you couldn’t force friendships or really even cultivate them once you had them. If they broke, they broke. (Alternatively, familial bonds were by nature unbreakable.) I don’t know if I ever realized it was possible to be more connected to a place or a community, to feel a sense of ownership over where you lived, until I went to grad school in southern Ohio.
Athens, Ohio, was described as an “oasis” by one of my professors when I first started. He’s right, but you could also call it a fishbowl or a pit, depending on how you’re feeling about it on a given day: a small, beautiful, quaint, overgrown Appalachian town, like Pittsburgh, minus the skyscrapers and bridges. The university, cafes, bookstores, bars, a Walmart, a Kroger, and then miles and miles of trees and hills and houses. In Athens, everyone knew everyone, for better or worse. (In fact, Athens could easily be another borough of Pittsburgh: Wilkinsburg, just outside Pittsburgh city limits, where I live now, is similarly overgrown and beautiful, with independent gourmet bakeries and bookstores a stone’s throw from my house. The lush Frick Park is a few minutes away.)
What changed for me between my hometown and Athens? Since I’d lived at home for college, grad school marked the first time that I was really on my own, not just in a new living space but in a new town, hours away from home. There was a need to connect with new people, which I hadn’t had before, when I lived with my family; there was also a need to work to maintain connections. There was a sense of freedom that accompanied these needs, a feeling of curiosity, about people and places. A willingness to explore and to get entrenched and to be humble and adventurous and put myself out there, which I didn’t have growing up—or if I did, I wasn’t sure what to do with it.
Strangely, whatever sense of pride or ownership I had over Northeast Ohio or Athens, Ohio strengthened once I left them. I only lived in Athens for three years, but I still felt more like an Athenian than a Pittsburgher in my fourth year here in PA. But was this ownership, or was it nostalgia? Can you feel a connection to a place without wanting to live there? (Obviously, the answer is yes, in the same way that you can make fun of your parents but nobody else can, and yet you might not want to live with your parents ever again.)
I finally began to feel more like a Pittsburgher when I officially gave up the idea of ever moving away again, sometime in 2023. Once I dug my feet in and decided This is where I’ll be for the long term, I began to care less about whether I truly “belonged.” Belonging, in a lot of ways, happens naturally, but it also happens intentionally. I decided I belonged here, and I changed careers from a remote writing position at a California-based website to a job at a local literary nonprofit where I really feel like I have the power to contribute to my community. I feel I’ve been entrusted with something valuable to take care of, and in that way my sense of ownership grows.
My partner, a combat veteran, once said that when someone is hurt, it’s just as important to give them a task to complete, a way to contribute, as it is to heal their wounds: feeling needed, as if others rely on you, is just as important to survival as getting what you need.
I don’t know anything about this person from Washington who wrote that teardown of Pittsburgh—an essay that almost seemed designed to generate engagement, The Cut-style. But I wonder how much she gave to Pittsburgh. It’s easier, I think, to be defensive of a place or to feel a sense that a community isn’t meeting your needs when you don’t extend your hands, either to help or to receive. It takes vulnerability and humility to put in the work, and to realize it’s not necessarily a failure on the part of your town if you aren’t getting what you need from it. It also takes humility to acknowledge that you deserve to have your needs met, and that, yes, the place you choose to spend your days and invest your time and energy does owe you something. In a way, being in love with a town is like being in love with a person. It’s give and take.
I keep using the word “ownership,” which I’m not wild about but which feels like such an apt word for pride in and connection to your town, the same way that “belonging” is, even though these words are really opposites. I guess that’s the point: to be at home in a place is to let it take care of you and to be a steward of the place as well. How am I a steward of the place in which I live? What do I do to better my community, on the large scale and the small? Am I kind to my neighbors, am I kind to my friends, to the people on the street, to the children, the animals? Do I donate my time and my money to worthy causes? Do I cultivate plants? Do I cultivate beauty? When I take a book from a little free library, do I leave one in return? (Rhetorically speaking, I think so, or I hope so; literally speaking…the answer is often no, but I’m trying to be better about this, I swear.) These actions strengthen my connection to this space as well as to the world; they impact this space as well as the world. I have to believe they do; I feel that they do; they do. They do.