They say you can't go home again, and until recently I believed them.

After all home, once you leave, is your past. You step out of it and change forever. You construct your own reality, build your life as you see fit, examine your values and set up your world according to the information and opinions you've collected. It's like pulling all the receipts you've crammed into your wallet out and sorting them, tossing the ones you don't need and filing the ones you do. It's just the natural order of things. After a while, that just becomes your normal. Home and the way it was still exists, but more as an impression rather than something real that takes place every day, even when you're not there. Home, no matter how much it changes while you're gone, still changes less than you yourself do.

Trying to go home again after that seems like an impossibility, or worse. For me for a long time it felt like an assault. I was comfortable with how I was living my life, how I'd grown and changed. But it was foreign to everyone else who remained behind when I left. I became foreign. People I'd known my whole life treated me as they always had, which of course didn't work, because I wasn't the same. So, every time I traveled the 6000 kilometers from my current home to the place where I grew up, I experienced intense feelings of dread beforehand and existential angst afterwards. I felt torn between the two places, like I was straddling a too-tall fence that only enabled me to have one foot on the ground at a time.

I am inexorably drawn to the east coast. In many ways it's who I am. Just as the land is carved out by the ocean, so have I been formed and molded by where I'm from. Cape Breton has its cliches, which pass for distinctiveness by many people's standards. It's the land of fiddles and kitchen parties, funny accents, fishing and mining, stunning vistas of the wild Atlantic juxtaposed against rolling farmland. And it's true that those things are part of what makes the island special. But not because they're unique Cape Breton. Other places have those things as well. But these things are signifiers of something else. They're picturesque stand-ins for the character of a resilient people making the best of hard times and bad weather, who blend stoicism with an irrepressible sense of humor, who believe no matter how things get, they're really not that bad. But underneath the warmth and charm has always run an undercurrent of ruin. Poverty. Pillaged natural resources. I'd often thought of Cape Breton as a sort of Marilyn Monroe figure--extremely beautiful, full of life and vibrancy, but also fragile, damaged, and exploited. With that comes a certain negativity. A willingness to continue on the same path, complicit in one's own failure to transcend what's been apparently prescribed by centuries of history.

I went to Cape Breton expecting my experience to be the same as it had been every other time I returned--I'd feel apart and oddly otherworldly. Disjointed. The connection wouldn't be there. I believed I'd return after the trip with that same divisive feeling I used to get, far ahead and yet somehow also left out. Unable to exist in two separate places--how I was before I left, and who I am now.But this time it was different. I've been working hard, and doing good work. The person I've become thus far, and who moves through her days determined to become more positive, more and deeply and thoroughly satisfied with who she is was able to look beyond patterns and the seemingly inescapable grasp of past habits and expressions and to shake off expectations simply by not participating in their reinforcement. I learned that it was possible to gently slip around them, so delicately that the movement almost goes unnoticed by anyone else, like water flowing around stones.

And that is the difference. Going home is not a monolithic act of returning to a discrete moment in time or to a physical location. It is the act of bringing all parts of yourself back to the familiar with the understanding that we are each water, swirling around one another for all time.