I grew up about an hour away from where I go to college. Nevertheless, when I mention the name of my hometown, the response is always the same: “...where?”

Like the thousands of small towns sprawled across the United States, the area I spent ten years of my life wasn’t exactly prosperous. It wasn’t necessarily withering, either. When I was nine, my family and I moved from Indiana, where cities are bordered by cornfields, to the state of coast-to-coast beaches and Disney World. My “new” hometown didn’t hold a candle to the economic problems that plagued my birthplace at the time. Even the only mall in the entire county was massive in comparison to what I was used to.

Florida residents hail from every part of the United States, but my area in particular boasted plenty of natives along with its share of snowbirds. Sometimes, being an “outsider” allowed me to see my home away from home with a slightly different perspective than those who I grew up with, many of whom had families who settled in the area generations before them. Tired of seeing the same faces every day, many of us spent our formative years counting down to when we could leave and not look back. Small towns can seem nightmarish: everyone knows everyone and you’re surrounded by people with parochial mindsets. Since I wasn't a native, I never felt as though I could fully relate to the disdain my peers had for our hometown. When I imagined how I’d felt if I hadn’t moved and central Indiana was all I had known, it became easier to empathize. Thus, my 1,300-some high school cohort was as catty and teenager-y as you could imagine, but if anything could bond us, it was our desire to get out.

A while ago, some college classmates and I reminisced on our lives before we had to embrace adulthood. They went to well-funded, heavily populated schools with stellar academic programs and sports teams that made national rankings. I went to a school that didn't have offer foreign languages beyond Spanish II and had a 200-seat auditorium older than most of our grandparents. My classmates certainly had bragging rights, but I realized as the more they talked about their school’s accomplishments how impersonal their actual experiences as high schoolers seemed to be, as if going to a huge college was simply an extension an environment they'd already been acclimated to.

I thought about how so many of my peers have remained best friends with each other years after we graduated, despite how much we’re told we’ll lose touch with each other by then. I thought about how much my classmates could come together by mutually loving a wonderful teacher or even hating an awful one. I thought about how much I’ll always appreciate the fact our last hour as high school students was our own football field, not in a giant arena that had to prepare for another school’s graduation three hours after. Even if my hometown paled in comparison to the larger cities my college classmates were from, they didn’t seem to share a commonality with the people they grew up with like my high school classmates did. In life, you quickly learn how scarce that commonality is when the world gets bigger.

Perhaps I’m influenced by my parents--who both hailed from the same rural Indiana town and have always held it dear to them--but I’ve learned to love where I’m from. Even if nobody were to really want to come back, we’ll always carry our home with us; after all, it is what shaped us individually and collectively. Being from a small town certainly has disadvantages, but it has allowed us to grow with the same people year after year--even if only a few of them were lucky enough to leave footprints in our hearts for life. And even when we constantly complained about the people and the places, we knew deep down that mutual dislike can glue people together like nothing else can. No matter what paths we all take, only we can remember the Taco Johns and when the vice principal cheered every morning over the intercom before class. When someone from my hometown finally becomes a Grammy-winning artist or the president of the United States, we’ll all be beaming with pride because, at long last, we'll be put on the map for something that isn’t reality television.