“So where are you from?”
That’s a loaded question.
I tell them Houston, Texas. Every time I say it out loud, the words don’t really sound like my own. Rather, they seem to form a partial picture, as if they’re glossing over a fuller story of struggle and displacement.
How much does a place truly define us? I am lovingly identified by friends as “Texas Eryn,” and when I’m running late, it’s because I’m on “Texas Time.” But I don’t know anything about Houston, really, apart from recognizing its frustrating urban sprawl. It's diverse, full of skyscrapers and medical centers, fast food restaurants and neighborhoods I never took the time to fully imprint to memory. I rooted against the Astros in the 2019 World Series. I don’t think I knew what the Alamo was until I was 15.
My teenage years are muddled with the hazy colors of a Texas sky.
My earliest memories are not intertwined with flat Texas landscape. Instead, youth looks like my Virginia home’s wood-floored living room where we put the Christmas tree. It looks like the Japanese Maple sitting meditatively in the front yard, the one my dad and I took father-daughter dance pictures in front of, and it looks like a roped-off, remodeled kitchen with faint cat prints on the wet concrete. Childhood looks like the trails by my house where my mother would take pictures of the sunset and I’d walk to art class—where I’d look at the steeplechase jumps and wish that one day, I’d be a good enough rider to take them in stride with a horse of my own.
And yet I’m not wholly defined by Virginia, either.
My teenage years are muddled with the hazy colors of a Texas sky. A strange dichotomy of fear and elation shapes my mind’s Houston skyline. I cannot ignore the tinge of pain when I claim Houston as my own knowing it shares mental space with a 14-year-old’s naïve, catastrophic feeling of doom. For almost four years, I considered Texas merely a waiting game before my life–something only capable of happening in Virginia–restarted.
The days crawled by as I endured them, then suddenly passed in a moment. The good ones were mere seconds.
But growth is inevitable, even when we feel still. Try as I might, I failed to remain suspended as one version of myself. Time itself is a force of movement. Time is change, even as we fight against it.
My years in Texas were not wasted, as I initially expected. I got a lot better at my sport (eventing— a type of horseback riding). I found best friends who brought flowers when I was sick, and I got really good at making props for live theater. I went to homecoming, I discovered I’m type A, I went to therapy for being too type A, I fell in love with a (gasp) native Texan, I figured out I want to be a lawyer. I applied to UVA. I got in. Without my noticing, just trying to survive turned into a collection of experiences that define who I am. The days crawled by as I endured them, then suddenly passed in a moment. The good ones were mere seconds. Seconds I now wish I could rerun over and over until I’ve had my fill. Until I finally appreciate them.
But isn’t that really who I am not where I’m from? We bestow power and virtue upon locations we call our own. I feel as though the Eryn before you was forged in fire; a fear of isolation and a desperate need to prove herself arose from Texas. Do I really want to treat kindly the place of days I endured and conquered, scars being my proof? Do I want to claim that Texas helped shape the very soul of the bright young woman before you if it’s intertwined with so many of my darkest memories?
That house that heard bells of laughter when my friends slept over on grey carpet is the very same one that heard my silent anger, my prayers at night to let someone, anyone, make me feel seen. And it took more than a year before the walls even tried to answer.
It’s hard to imagine I would have been happier in a life without Houston, because that life necessarily lacks the memories of Texans I cling to with white knuckles.
A small part of me is still that hurt 14-year-old holding a grudge against a place I never chose as home. Part of me wants to hurt Texas, to regain control by stripping it of any influence over my proudest accomplishments.
But, like a hurt 14-year-old, am I just being dramatic?
Maybe life forces us to endure. Maybe the locale is irrelevant. After all, there is no feasible way to conceptualize how living in northern Virginia during formative teenage years would have changed me, for worse or for better. It’s hard to imagine I would have been happier in a life without Houston, because that life necessarily lacks the memories of Texans I cling to with white knuckles. I must say I’m from Texas, because to ignore the past four years is to relegate the joys I experienced as inconsequential. To dismiss those who made my life special--who I think of fondly and often, and who wish I could show Virginia’s fall colors to, who I hope think about me, who brought me happiness beyond compare after I felt as though I never could again--is disrespectful. They made me as much as the difficulties. A part of them goes with me everywhere I turn.
Maybe they’re where I’m from. But that’s a bit of a long-winded answer considering the context of the question, which is likely a casual setting involving loud music and icebreakers. It’s impossible to explain who I am from in less than 30 seconds. Maybe, if those who ask have the time, I’ll let them figure it out on their own. If they have the patience for it, they can collect all the pieces of me, the small stories spanning across the United States that form my complicated tapestry of self-origin.
Or maybe they’ll be content with the short answer.
“I’m from Houston.”
