My favorite line from Journey’s "Don't Stop Believin'" has, and always will be, “Just a small town girl…living in a lonely world.” Every time I hear those lyrics I become more and more convinced that it was written specifically for me. I grew up in a town of 500 people: there wasn’t a single stoplight, everybody knew everybody, and the heaviest traffic we ever got was in the middle of summer, when combines and wheat trucks came to life. When I made the decision to attend a large university after high school, I realized just how small my hometown really was. My new friends were intrigued by this mysterious ghost town that I spoke of and fired question after question at me. So, to answer everyone’s questions once and for all, or to help a fellow small-towner out with their own answers, here are some common inquiries you’re bound to eventually face:

1. You graduated with how many people?! Wait, but your school was private, right? Well, no. If it were private I’m afraid there would be approximately 10 students in the entire school.
2. How did prom work? Forget senior prom: you can go all four years, baby! And hopefully you don’t have too many rivals from the other towns in the whole county, because guess what: they’ll all be there, too! Oh, and forget the fancy venue: a simple high school gymnasium where you played your district basketball tournament in will do.
3. How did dating work? Does everyone just date the same people? If you didn’t have a fling with your best friend’s ex-boyfriend from eighth grade or make friends in another town just to have them set you up with someone, you didn’t grow up in the middle of freaking nowhere.
4. What did you do in your spare time? I have two answers for this one. Number one, extracurricular activities; and number two, I honestly don’t know. People always marvel at all of the clubs and activities my classmates and I were involved in. But what those people don’t realize is that we literally had nothing else to do. And when there’s not any practices, meetings, or events, it’s a toss up. Drive around town and listen to music? Watch TV? Sleep? Eat? Check Facebook? Wait: just kidding, there’s not enough service to do that.
5. But at least you have a movie theater and restaurants and stuff? LOL, try again. If you want to go see that new "Hunger Games" movie, you better have a lot of time to kill because it’ll be at least a 40-minute drive to the nearest theater. And getting something as simple as a Starbucks Frappuccino? It’s as sacred as Christmas Day.
6. Were you friends with everyone? Of course—you didn’t even have a choice! You were playing in your diapers with the same people who walk with you on graduation day. You don’t really get to choose your friends in these towns: so pray that you get some good ones.
7. How did you survive? Sometimes I ask myself this same question. But then I think of the Dixie Chicks singing about “wide open spaces” and I know that that was exactly what I needed to be morphed into the person I am today…even though I never really got the “new faces” that they also sing about.

Keep doing your thing, small towns: you’re doing something right (even if the rest of the world doesn’t know it yet).