Do I feel like the same person both in Gainesville, Florida, and my hometown of East Brunswick, New Jersey?
At first glance, this question reminds me of the infamous one every person has probably encountered at least once on their birthday: Do you feel any older? Any different?
For me, the answer was always the same big no. Why would one day of the year make me feel any different just because of the supposed meaning attached to it? Of course I feel the same.
For a while, I felt like time accelerated around me whilst I stayed frozen and constant. Mentally, I was a Virgin Suicides thirteen dressed up as a Lady Bird seventeen. Though one could argue they are two sides of the same coin.
I was still imagining my fig tree of career choices as if I didn’t have impending internship applications due. As if it wasn’t my third year in a major I’m still somewhat unsure about. As if I didn’t live in a new state away from my family. As if lifelong partners and full-time jobs hadn’t quietly become normal conversations.
I still have to pause when someone asks me my age. Twenty doesn’t roll off the tongue as easily as nineteen did. The “teen” part of my age felt like a placeholder for shoes still too large to fit, a way to hold onto the thread of adolescence despite the looming fact that this chapter is supposed to be one of young adulthood.
I am like a sheep in wolf’s clothing, a child playing pretend as an adult. Or at least that’s how I feel whenever the reality check hits me: another year has passed, and somehow I still feel unchanged.
I just keep waiting to feel different.
To feel changed.
So, when I look at this question, what I’m really asking is whether or not a location will finally make me feel this “difference.” If anything will.
In some ways, it feels easier to recognize change in others than it does in myself. I can think of several people from high school who seem almost unrecognizable from the highlight reels I see of their college experiences on Instagram and their LinkedIn updates. People who have found their style, their friendships, their passions, their jobs, their footing in this world.
I look at them and think, Wow. They’ve changed.
Maybe they look at me and think the same thing.
I probably do seem different.
There’s the New Jersey-to-Florida pipeline, the brunette to blonde, the cowboy boots that now frequent my outfits. Superficially, I have somewhat morphed into a new aesthetic. My eye for photography has sharpened. My confidence is a little better than it once was. There are things on my resume that the version of me who graduated high school couldn’t have imagined putting there.
But I don’t necessarily experience these things as transformation. They happened gradually, folded into the natural progression of time. There was never some morning where I woke up and thought, There. I’m different now.
Of course, there are differences in how I feel in both locations. This is true almost anywhere I go. Whenever I travel, I find myself trying on a new hat for the short period of time I’m there, entertaining the idea that I can be anyone and do anything.
But Gainesville and East Brunswick feel different because they are not just different places.
They seem to exist on opposite sides of time.
New Jersey carries the nostalgia of who I was; my past. Florida feels impermanent and transitory, but it is also the place where I am constantly constructing whatever comes next.
That mentality carries into how I operate in each place.
In Gainesville, my Google Calendar has to document nearly every fraction of the day, building breathing room into a color-coded blur of meetings, work shifts, classes, and commitments. I am surrounded by some of the most ambitious people I’ve ever met. They make me want to be better. There is always something else to apply for, someone else to meet, another responsibility to take on, another version of myself I could possibly become.
Gainesville keeps me looking forward.
When I’m home, I’m hit with “remember when’s.”
I see the photo wall that lines the hallway up to my childhood bedroom. I see the stack of books I never got through reading. I see corners of every room that were once filled with people I don’t talk to anymore. Streets where I can remember exactly who I was the last time I drove down them. Restaurants attached to people. Songs attached to car rides. Entire versions of myself archived in places that have stayed mostly the same.
East Brunswick keeps me looking backward.
In a way, Florida allows me to forget. To put distance between the versions of me that existed and the version of me I strive to be. Gainesville gives me enough motion that I rarely have to stop and account for every person I have already been.
Home doesn’t afford me that same luxury.
There, I am surrounded by evidence.
And maybe that is why I struggle to feel like I have changed.
Change seems like it should be something dramatic enough to recognize while it is happening. A birthday. A move. A new hair color. A milestone that neatly divides one version of yourself from another.
But maybe that isn’t how it works.
Maybe I am the same person in Gainesville and East Brunswick, just positioned differently in relation to my own life. In New Jersey, I am confronted by all the versions of myself I have already been. In Gainesville, I am occupied with whoever I am still trying to become.
Neither place creates an entirely different person. They simply hold up different mirrors.
And perhaps the reason I never wake up feeling older or suddenly changed is because I am standing too close to myself to notice it happening.
Maybe change is only visible through distance—between birthdays, between versions of yourself, or between two places that remember you differently.
So yes, I feel like the same person in Gainesville and East Brunswick.
But I’m beginning to think feeling the same and being the same are two very different things.