Learning to float

Or: Welcome to All Over the Place

Me at a café in São Paulo in 2022. Photographed by my sweet friend Charlotte.

I have never been able to float on my back in a pool. I wouldn’t call myself a particularly strong swimmer, but I grew up around water — my summers were spent evading the Georgia heat in lakes, creeks, and my grandmother’s pool. When my older cousins taught me to swim, they demonstrated how to lean back and let the water cradle me. It looked so peaceful. When I lean back, I sink. I still don’t know why.

I spent many nights as a teenager crouched over my bedroom floor, working myself to tears over an insurmountable fear that I may never escape my hometown in Georgia. Now that I’m a bit older and have the capacity for nuance, I know that Georgia is not a bad place to end up. Georgia is where history unfolded to create me: A man abandoned fourteen children in Alabama and moved to Georgia, where he fathered fourteen more children. One of those kids grew up, met a man from the town over, and had a son named Curt. Ten miles away, a teenage girl decided to become a parent with a man whom I have never met, and their baby was named Tabitha. A couple of decades later, Curt and Tabitha served detention together in high school  — He was smoking cigarettes in the restroom, and she said a curse word in her cheerleading uniform. A few years later, I was born. How could I hate the place where so much went right for me?

My healthy relationship with Georgia is a relatively new development. I followed through on those melodramatic teenage dreams and then some; I escaped Georgia and kept going until I was on a new continent. I found myself in Cape Town, São Paulo, Prague, Copenhagen, Cairo, and a litany of other surreal locations. What shocked me more than cultural differences was how fondly I thought of home, even to the extent of feeling guilty for leaving. My dilemma is that I love so many places and the people in them. I have felt at home in hostels, dorm rooms, city apartments, and my grandmother’s old farmhouse. Whenever I’m in one place, I miss the other.

I don’t know if it’s normal to be twenty-four years old and feel like I have lived a thousand beautiful lifetimes. The tiny version of me that lives in my head is treading water in lakes of gratitude, joy, guilt, love, and other immense feelings. Sometimes I feel like I could suffocate from all the stories inside of me. In those moments I wonder, where can I put it all?

Well, hopefully here in this newsletter. I have never been comfortable expressing myself in conversation, but I can write a story. It’s so much easier to say I love you and I’m sorry in writing, where I can piece together my jumbled thoughts like sorting paper from a shredder. Words come easy to me here. Words make my head and heart lighter. And I want to be light. I want to float.