Rebuilding Rob

As WordPress continues to recycle old prompts, I pulled another prompt from The Coffee Monsterz Co to respond to today

Are you happy living where you live?

I’ve lived in the Detroit Metro area for most of my life. It has always been a love and hate-relationship between this area and myself. I love the familiarity I have with the area. It there is so much I dislike about it too.

As a kid, I always felt out of place here. I always felt like people looked down their noses at me. I hated it The song “Subdivisions” by Rush spoke volumes to me. Growing up, all I thought about was getting out of this town and getting out of the state. I suppose in that sense it does make sense that I moved to South Carolina, as soon as a job opportunity presented itself.

The people here are just hard. It’s a tougher place to be in, there’s no denying that. It was quite a shock for me when I moved to Charleston, South Carolina. Charleston is a place at prides itself on how polite its citizens are. Driving on the roads down there, I felt like I was gonna run everybody over. I never thought of myself as an aggressive driver until I moved to Charleston. When I came back to Detroit, I felt like I was going to get rundown myself.

When I used to travel – to other big cities in particular, I would say to myself “man we really are deprived in Detroit”. For years, we didn’t have a lot of the things in Detroit that other big cities have. That has been changing over the last two decades; and for that, I couldn’t be happier.

While the Michigan summers are amazing, the winters are every bit the opposite. I’ve written before about how inexperienced seasonal anxiety for the first time while I was in college. As I sought counseling in begin taking medicine for anxiety I have been able to get both my anxiety and my seasonal depression in check. I’m still like crazy about winters, but this winter seems to have gone by kind of quickly.

Of course, now I am in my glory. Baseball started this past Thursday, and I couldn’t be happier. As I’ve mentioned before, it is my favorite sport, but I think more than anything, it serves a reminder to me that winter is over.

Weather and mental health aside, I love living in this part of Michigan. We do experience all four seasons, which I cannot really say about many other parts of the country. I love the fact that I live in a suburban area that come up until Covid, seem like it was going to never stop growing. Covid stopped everything and its tracks, so I’ll give the city the benefit of the doubt for that.

But I also love the fact that I am a 30 minute commute from Detroit proper. It’s true. The city had a horrible reputation for decades, and it was very well justified. But the last 20 years I’ve seen more development and growth in the city than I have in any other point in my lifetime. I love Detroit. While I’ve never lived in the city, I do like to claim it as my own. 

Maybe some of this is just the natural local, territorial pride that one would have in their hometown. But as I get older, I think a lot about the fact that my parents grew up in Detroit. My grandparents made a life for themselves in Detroit. It’s a multigenerational thing.

Even with kid 1, who’s lived his entire life in South Carolina, I still think that part of him is very much Michigan.  It’s in our blood. It always will be. 

Thanks for stopping by Rebuilding Rob. Be sure to like, 👍 comment and subscribe to my blog below. It’s greatly appreciated! Also, feel free to follow me on social media as well! Check out my most recent posts as well as some earlier, related posts

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• A Death in the Family (And My Disposable Income): My Life in Comics
• The Supporting Cast: Navigating the Eras of Male Friendship
• Life is What Happens: A Look Back at My Non-Existent 2025 Vision
• The Moment I Walked Inside a Hallmark Movie

The article “Made in Metro Detroit “first appeared on Rebuilding Rob.