Hometowns Are Not To Be Taken Granted For
Throughout middle school and high school, all I wanted to do was leave my hometown of Vallejo, California. Imagine a city listed as one of the highest crime rates in the whole nation, where if you live in one of the bad neighborhoods, you get used to sleeping to the sound of gunshots, tires screeching, or people yelling at three in the morning. Fortunately for me, I grew up at the right place with family and friends that helped me avoid becoming a statistic of violence that would further make Vallejo a much more worser place to be in. I was also fortunate enough to leave Vallejo, but I will always bring a piece Vallejo with me.
I spent seven years at a school that was a combined middle and high school, but my graduating class ended up to be the size of at-most seventy people. Also imagine going to school, seeing the same faces every school day for seven years. Everyone in my class knew each other, and everyone knew the drama between person a and person b. My school was diverse, everyone was raised with parents from different cultural backgrounds, but for some reason we all had similar perspectives about multiple things ranging from clothes to politics, and we all had this Bay Area slang because we were all mostly raised either in Vallejo or a city in the Bay Area. Ultimately, school wasn’t one of the reasons why I wanted to leave Vallejo, but because of some events that led to my school being on lockdown. For example, we even had a practice lockdown drill, and that ended up to be a real lockdown lasting till the rest of the school day.
Finally the day came, and I left Vallejo to go to college. At first I was shy and antisocial. I even stayed in my dorm until we had icebreaker activities outside to meet other people. When I finally met other people it was a interesting experience! Everyone came from different areas of California, and some even moved from a different state. People had their own different unique personalities, and it was so cool to see how people from SoCal weren’t used to hearing the word “hella”. Being a DJ back home, I heard different types of genres of music being played that wouldn’t really be played back home. I’d say about week later, I got used to living at college.
A few weeks later, it finally hit me. I was homesick and I miss Vallejo. I realized that I have spent my whole childhood wanting to leave, but I never really spent time to appreciate where I came from. Throughout the time I lived in Vallejo, I developed my own unique personality that carried with me to college. To many of those that I met, everyone had their own unique personality that couldn’t have been developed during the couple weeks that they spent in college. It was also interesting to see how other people’ hometowns shaped how they do things today, and how they perceive certain things.
To sum the story up, hometowns are not to be taken granted for. I spent more time focusing on how bad my hometown was that I haven’t noticed how it helped grow my personality. I believe it is important for most young individuals to realize how important their hometown is to their life. I am thankful for where I came from, and I am more than delighted to share all the good food spots in Vallejo if anyone would choose to visit there.