Maybe home can be found in that warm sense of disconnect.

Over the past four and a half days, I have slowly made my way south to the land of deep strip mall and gothic eyeliner, to box stores and massive cineplex, to Starbucks at every corner and mini marts named "Hi-Ya"...

I am officially home for the holidays.

I wish I could say I was at a point in my adult life where I felt a connection or a capacity to relate to the people surrounding me here. But I don't. I sit at a local market in London and look around, feeling somewhat - disgusted (honestly) - by the small town, urban hillbilly mentality. Or what I assume is so. I am frightened by my own close-mindedness, in disguise as open-minded metropolitan disdain for their apparent small-mindedness - but I know better. What's going on here is really my own need to feel included. And the fact that I never did - always the artsy, overly-aesthetic creature, without an Opera house or art gallery to call my own. I grew up a fish on a cement sidewalk- and that's one of the reasons why I still like it that way - I have been living in Québec now for 10 years and counting, complaining and equally loving the fact that I remain, and always will, an outsider, a stranger in a (most certainly) strange land.

Myy lived experience, of never having felt connected to my home or the people here growing up, of having always felt different and at odds with my first environments, has led to now assuming that everyone still living here has nothing of interest to say or to contribute to the social fabric. Seriously. It's intense. I am being honest because it's important for me to understand my own biases and judgements - that although I can travel to the middle of nowhere somewhere else and find a heap of gorgeousness in the people there (and I know there is gorgeousness in people everywhere) there is something about this sense of HOME, of THIS IS ME here that is unsettling. Perhaps what is most unsettling of all is my own humanness in it all.