By Alexa Cheaney
I grew up in a small midwest town, the sleepy kind that you see in the movies. It had the cute downtown that’s always festive, the folks that somehow know everything about everyone, the maybe once-in-a-decade murder in central park, you know, run-of-the-mill kind of stuff.
What they don’t tell you about these towns is that they get stuffy. If you spend long enough there, like I did, you start to notice how much repetition is around you. Every house is a cookie-cutter copy of the one next to it, and to an extent, so are the people inside.
With a population of about 6,000, there was a strong sense of community. Most of the kids I grew up with had lived there for their entire lives like me.
But for some reason, I didn’t feel like I was a part of it. Most days I couldn’t really tell you what it was, I could just tell you that I didn’t belong. It was as if something in my mold was missing, or even present in excess.
I have siblings, but they’re upwards of 15 years older than I am, so I grew up as an only child.
I had friends, I had people I talked to at school, but I would go home to a house that was essentially void of all other life.
Growing up, my mother struggled with addiction and my father worked over 70 hours a week. To say I was lonely was an understatement.
Some days it was a comfortable kind of lonely, the kind that almost feels like a warm hug.
Other days, it threatened to swallow me whole, like a hug where you’ve gotta tap the other person to let go because they’re squeezing just a bit too tight and you’re starting to see stars.
When it came time for me to graduate I was more than ready to get out of Metro Detroit.
In August of 2021, I moved up to the west side for my freshman year of college at Grand Valley State University.
I wanted so desperately to be excited, I wanted to reinvent myself and be successful and leave the past behind and start anew. Everything was new. I had every opportunity.
But I found myself nervous more times than not. I was excited, I was having fun but I was also deeply uncomfortable.
Welcome Week at a new school can be a lot. You’re meeting hundreds of new people in a new setting each day and then going to bed in an unfamiliar place.
I had a familiar face with me though, my best friend of six years and I had gone to the same college.
We fell into a groove after the first few weeks. She and I lived in the same dorm building and we became friends with four other girls who lived there as well. Before we knew it, the six of us were spending more time together than not.
Then Halloween rolled around, and that was the last weekend I would ever speak to the person I thought would be my maid of honor.
Resentment grows without conversation, and with alcohol, frustrations tend to come loose. College can be hard, and leaving home can be hard. Your head has to be in the right place for you to be successful.
In the wake of everything I expected to be devastated, but I was oddly okay. She was there for me through so many critical points in my life, and I got to be there for her as well. It was over. The friendship had run its course. It felt like everything was new again. All traces of my hometown were officially gone.
Leaves fell from the trees and snow fell from the sky, Halloween music turned to Christmas music, and our group of six became a group of five. The year kept going.
Through the rest of the year, my mental health took a slow but aggressive nosedive and my grades began to slip in response.
With the end of the semester slowly creeping up on us, I had to start thinking about where I would live when it was time to go back home.
I lived with my aunt and uncle during my senior year of high school in response to the peak of my mother’s addiction and my father’s avoidance. After some rather uncomfortable conversation, it was decided I would live with them again.
Things got worse after moving home.
I had been dismissed from Grand Valley State University due to my grades.
My family and I immediately jumped into an action plan to get me back on track.
I took a study skills class that summer and went on antidepressants, and I decided to move back to the west side that upcoming fall and enroll at Grand Rapids Community College with the hope of reapplying to GVSU the next year.
At this point, I wasn’t even trying to “make things better”, or live a fulfilling life. I was trying to fix myself, and that just made me fall apart a little bit more.
The study skills class felt belittling. It was meant for kids years younger than me and truthfully being there was a hit to my ego.
The antidepressants didn’t help, but they did change me. I felt like part of my brain was roped off, and instead of feeling bad and having the opportunity to process and deal with my thoughts it just felt like a door had been shut. My negative emotions had no way out, so they just bounced off the walls of my brain. My internal monologue had become an echo chamber of negativity.
The summer passed, and I moved into my first apartment at the end of August 2022.
It took about two weeks before it reached the point where it was unsafe for me to be there.
I had told my friends before moving that I was struggling pretty severely. After the move, they expressed to me that they were concerned about my mental health and asked if they could speak to my therapist in confidence.
That day turned into a string of phone calls. My friends spoke to my therapist, I spoke to my friends, I spoke to my therapist, my therapist spoke to my family and my friends and then I spoke to my therapist and my family.
Somewhere in there the concern was raised that due to how much weight I had lost, my prescribed sleeping pills were counteracting with my liver and I was experiencing organ failure.
I was required to go to the emergency room and get checked out.
In the ER they ran blood tests and everything came back okay. My physical health was fine, but my mental health clearly needed more attention. It was decided that night that I was going to withdraw from school and seek out more intensive therapy.
I spent three months away from the west side and was faced with the inescapable choice to get better or stay bitter.
I chose to get better.
I had to change my outlook on life and then, and only then, was the real moment when everything was new. By clearing out my past traumas in my head, I made so much room for love in my heart.
When it was time for me to return to Grand Rapids I was scared. I didn’t know how I would be received when I came back. I had put my friends through a lot, and they had valid reasons to cut me out but instead, they taught me a few things.
They taught me that shame is no match for empathy, the importance of space and boundaries and that the right people stay.
I don’t think I would have survived it if they didn’t have the courage to call my therapist that day. It has truly been the greatest privilege of my lifetime to have people who love me so fiercely.
Another thing they taught me is that love is the most transformative property on the planet, both in void and in excess.
I’ve been back in Grand Rapids for nearly a year now and they continue to teach me these lessons, and many more every day.
They show me the way that love is present in small gestures, too. There’s love in sitting in silence together, in someone filling my water bottle when they go to fill their own, in the conversations you have at 3 a.m. that nobody may remember.
I think everyone feels out of place at one point or another, but I also think everyone does have a place. If you feel lost, it may be an uphill battle to find yours, but it can be one of life’s most rewarding experiences.
