Where are you from?

For my short answer to the question, check out the photo of my bomb-ass nails. For the long answer, read on, friends!

Yeah, this is how I did my nails for the Fourth. Yeah, I’m a basic bish.

By the time I started college, that was a difficult question to answer. As a recent transplant to the American South who didn’t recognize Nashville as a city when I first approached it by car, the easiest response was, “Not here.”

I was born in Torrance Memorial Hospital in Los Angeles County. When I was two, my family emigrated to Northern Ireland, my mom’s home country, of which I am also technically a citizen. When I was five, we moved back to L.A., where I started elementary school with an Irish accent. (“Do you speak Irish?” my kindergarten teacher asked me. “Yes!” I answered. “Can you say something?” she pressed. “I’m saying it right now,” I replied, confused. Of course, she meant Gaelic, and no, as a Protestant in the North, I didn’t learn it. Now I only pull out the accent when I’m teasing my mom.) When I was 13, we moved to Chicago, where I spent the heady, formative years of adolescence.

So when other freshmen would ask, “Where are you from?” I could either say Chicago, or tell a story. How I answered depended on why they were inquiring. Was it because my biting, deadpan humor threw them off? Or was it small talk? Or maybe because I used an unusual (to them) phrase or pronounced a word differently. One friend nicknamed me “Spurt” after I used the word in a way he thought was funny; he found my rangy vocabulary amusing.

The best answer is really, I’m American. My particulars may be unusual or unique, but a lot of us don’t come from any one place. A lot of us have moved around, or our families are immigrants, or we’ve teetered on a boundary of social class, or we have a foot in two different cultures. In his remarkable book The Omni-Americans, essayist Albert Murray wrote:

American culture, even in its most rigidly segregated precincts, is patently and irrevocably composite. It is, regardless of all the hysterical protestations of those who wouldn’t have it otherwise, incontestably mulatto. Indeed, for all their traditional antagonisms and obvious differences, the so-called black and so-called white people of the United States resemble nobody else in the world so much as they resemble each other. And what is more, even their most extreme and violent polarities represent nothing so much as the natural history of pluralism in an open society.

Only recently, after watching a lot of Formula One racing and listening to a lot of international anthems¹, I’ve realized how much I admire the American national anthem. The verse we all know and sing makes no mention of God or requires fealty to some idealized leader. It doesn’t itemize the things you must think or do or believe to be an American. It doesn’t rely on any particular historical narrative. It is a paean to our flag: a symbol of solidarity, hope, and promise, sewn by the hand of a woman.

O say can you see, by the dawn’s early light,
What so proudly we hail'd at the twilight's last gleaming,
Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight,
O’er the rampart we watch’d, were so gallantly streaming?

The United States weren’t always united, and they weren’t always states. Our American ancestors had a vision for what could be, and they fought for that vision. The residents of the United States, represented by a flag flown over Fort McHenry in the War of 1812, had to kill and be killed to achieve the freedom to pursue their vision. They persevered through internecine fights about the country’s direction. After a long, bloody fight in the dark of night, the first lines ask: is our dream still alive?

And the rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air, 
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there;

Even in the darkest hour, the people fighting for the dream of holding onto freedom repurposed the light from exploding ordnance, the light that signified the precarity of their cause, to look upward, forward, and see that what they were fighting for was still possible.

O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave 
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

When sung, the music is definitive and triumphant: the high note of “free,” the conclusive solemnity of “brave.” But the final line is a question. Do the ideals we’re aiming for still guide our eyes onward, upward? Is this American experiment still alive?

I believe, deeply, that if you are American, you are free. To be American, you don’t have to look a certain way, or believe certain things, or ascribe to certain ideologies. What makes us American is the ideal that we are free to believe and think whatever we wish, to present ourselves to the world however we wish, to the extent that our rights abut our neighbor’s right to the same.

We’re going to disagree on those boundaries. Sometimes we’ll feel alienated or misunderstood. But don’t internalize the lie: that our differences are unbridgeable, our unique selves unknowable. We are more alike than many would have us believe.

From the archive:

July 2016: Asheville, in brief

July 2013: That time I almost pranked my brother into a murder charge

July of 2012: My brush with fanciness and style in Washington DC : Bonus proof that I was once on Twitter

1. It’s quite the international sport, and whoever wins the podium gets their anthem played. The Netherlands anthem is unbearably long. The Mexican national anthem, interminable. The French anthem, if you speak French, is grim.