All of my life, I felt out of place in my hometown. It's not even that I didn't have friends or that I didn't have a decent life. Everything was perfectly fine in my life - I went to school, I hung out with my friends and family, and I participated in extracurricular activities. But everything eventually started to feel off about the way I was growing up. At some point, I started dreaming big. I wanted to go to New York so that I could work with books and publishing. I started telling people that I swore I was meant to live in a big city, and my friends and family agreed. I wanted opportunities that I just didn't have growing up, and I realized that opportunity is what my life was missing.
Growing up in a conservative small town in Minnesota is interesting. A lot of conservative viewpoints were pushed on me by the community. As I got older, I realized that these views were not what I believed in at all, and moving to college ended up being a bigger change than I thought it would be. Moving into a bigger place - a college area with more people that had the same mind set for me - was maybe the best thing I ever did for myself.
Being a liberal in a predominately conservative place is hard. I know it's true for people in the south more frequently, but it feels even harder in a place that is conservative, but located in a liberal state. My family and friends were conservatives in a lot of ways, and I felt like I couldn't voice my opinion on a plethora of topics. Everything that liberals/democrats try to "force" on the country was basically unquestionably hated by most people in my hometown.
I spent summers in a bigger city, and it was there that I started to realize that the way my community thought was nothing like what I thought. I realized I didn't know if I believed in God/gods, I didn't know how I felt about guns - I couldn't define my beliefs anymore. Throughout high school, I struggled with feeling like a small town was holding me down and that I was wasting any potential I could have utilized in a bigger place.
As soon as I started college and lived in an area with much more opportunity before, I knew what I had been missing. Of course, a bigger place would have more job opportunities, more entertainment opportunities, and more social opportunities. But the opportunity that mattered most was the one that the college gave me to be who I was truly meant to be. I could finally start creating an identity for myself that I was happy with - one that I wouldn't be ashamed of.
Being able to find my true beliefs and identity makes me more excited to move up in the world. Moving from a small town to a bigger place was the best thing I could have done for myself, and I only want to move more, explore more, and live more.
So, yes. Sometimes being from a small conservative town sucks - especially if you are meant to be somewhere else. But that doesn't mean you can't find your place, like I did. Everyone has a place somewhere, you just have to be willing to go out there and find where you belong.
