Wednesday, April 15, 2020 // The Statement
6B

W

here 
are 
you 

from?” 
is 
a 
hard 

question for me to answer. 

“Do you mean, where do 

I live right now?” is usually my most common rebuttal. 
I don’t mean to be difficult, I just want to provide an 
honest response. For me, it’s tricky to stick to a consistent 
story, and I try not to get too bogged down in the details. 
Before I turned 18, I had already lived in 12 different 
houses and attended eight different grade schools. 

I am jealous of my friends who can so easily whip out 

a response to the same question. “I’m from X city in X 
Midwestern state. I’ve lived in the same house my whole 
life.” The most straight-forward answer I can provide 
is that I’m from Charleston, S.C., which is where my 
family and I have resided since 2012. But the reality is 
I’ve lived all over the Southeastern coastline. 

I was born in Orlando, Fla., and lived there for 

probably a grand total of three months before my family 
moved to South Carolina for the first time. From there, 
we circulated Virginia for a decade, moving towns 
about every four years, first living around the Norfolk 
and Virginia Beach areas in the Chesapeake Bay before 
then heading upstate to Charlottesville in the Blue 
Ridge Mountains before eventually relocating back to 
Charleston, S.C., when I was 13. 

When I returned, it had been a decade since I last 

lived there. My mom pointed out to me that many of my 
classmates were kids that I had also been in preschool 
with, only I had no recollection of them. It made me 
wonder how many potentially fruitful and long-lasting 
relationships might have been thrown away due to my 
family’s constant relocation. I was furious. What was 
the point of moving so much if we just kept coming 
back to the same places? My parents eventually started 
calling me a “real estate brat” to our new neighbors at 
housewarming parties, as an obvious play on the term 
“military brat.”

Two years later, in 10th grade, I ended up heading 

back up to Virginia to attend boarding school. The school 
itself was all-boys, all-boarding and had a military dress 
code. I rarely left campus on the weekends, and the 
consistency of attending boarding school gave me a little 
bit of geographic security, even if it made my backstory 
even harder to trace. As I would walk to class along the 
brick walkways of the lush, Jeffersonian-style campus, 

I 
would 

ponder: Am 

I from Virginia 

or 
South 
Carolina? 

Neither 
answer felt right with my 

identity, 
and I couldn’t decipher which 

felt more like home, let alone answer it in an icebreaker 
or to a new acquaintance.

The reason for all this moving around was my father’s 

occupation as a real estate developer. In the business of 
neighborhood development, there’s always a new project. 
For my dad, that meant acting as a land management 
consultant for a Virginia winery or designing the street 
layout of a new community in suburban Charleston. The 
liquid nature of his job meant that every couple of years 
my family would have to haul our belongings to my dad’s 
new workplace — a new city, a new house, a new school. 

My dad grew up as a military brat to my grandfather, 

who was a fighter jet pilot in the Navy. Having moved 
from Texas to California to Italy, my father had lived 
across tens of thousands of miles across the nation and 
globe by the age of six. I often wonder what imprint 
this left on him as he transitioned to his adult life. Was 
a consistent nature of moving something that never 
bothered him? Or did my father learn to view moving 
around as being financially pragmatic? I wonder if 
his seemingly casual stance toward moving ended up 
having a bleeding effect on me.

I remember playing SimCity on CD-ROM and 

oftentimes having my dad inspect my computer model 
town complete with art museums and universities. I had 
him double-check for infrastructural errors with traffic 
patterns or commercial zoning. Afterward, I would 
destroy everything I’d built with a click of a button, 
whether it be a nuclear weapon, a tornado or a robotic 
Godzilla. Little did I know it, but I was quickly learning 
to let my deep-seated feelings and attachments go. 

Anything I could create or become invested in could 

disappear. My Tee Ball League, Cub Scouts, teachers 
and friends from school could all vanish in an instant. 
I was slowly becoming an incredibly hard-bitten child. 
I had developed no concept of geographic permanence 
as I internalized the hit-or-miss tendencies of the 
real estate industry. This habit only grew when my 
family’s financial security collapsed along with the 
entire housing market during the 2008 recession. The 
financial meltdown also left my mother, a freelance 
architect, out of a job. I knew we’d soon have to move 

homes to supplement our losses, but I wasn’t so shaken 
since I was no stranger to dropping my obligations on a 
dime’s notice. 

Even years before the market crashed, when I was 

eight or nine, I was playing with my toys when I 
realized I lost a Playmobil figure somewhere in my 
bedroom. Instead of crying and complaining to my 
mom, I remember thinking “It’s fine. It’s somewhere 
in here. I’ll find it when we move again and all the 
furniture is packed.” I can’t even remember in which 
house this occurred, but I can remember that feeling 
of knowing we were going to need to move again, 
eventually. 

I even acquired a sleep tactic that I still use fairly 

often, passed on to me from my father. It’s a popular old 
wives’ tale that if you’re having trouble going to sleep, 
you should resort to counting sheep in your head in order 
to drift off. I learned to do things a little differently: 
Instead of mindless counting, I try to remember every 
wall of every room I’ve ever lived in. I’m pretty certain 
this little trick works because I usually doze off before I 
can reach the room where I currently sleep. 

I start by trying to remember the placement of the 

windows, the closets and if there was a bathroom 
attached. I try to remember desks and picture frames 
and where my toy chest or lacrosse stick might have 
been placed. Where were the Dell computer console and 
the chalk easel? What clothes might have been left on 
the ground or tucked into my dressers? Before I can get 
into the detailed specifics, I’m fast asleep. 

But moving to 12 different houses was in no way all 

for naught. Over the years I naturally learned how to be 
charismatic by repeatedly being dropped into new social 
settings. I survived new classrooms and sports teams by 
learning to be funny. I also learned to be quiet when it 
was strategically necessary for me to make a good first 
impression. 

My time in Ann Arbor has been the best of my life 

so far, but I know I won’t stay here much longer. I’ve 
told many of my friends and family that the first place 
I move after graduation — though I’m not sure where, 
yet — will be my home for the next 20 years. I’m hoping 
New York so I can be there when the Knicks eventually 
turn things around and win a championship. I know 
long-term residency will be difficult to accomplish along 
with the looming uncertainty of our national economy 
and the volatility of the job market for young people, 
but I’m going to try my hardest to stick to one place for 
continuity’s sake. 

I know I have lived in enough childhood bedrooms 

to keep me counting them in my sleep for an eternity. 
However, I think there’s some emotional strength I 
could develop from staying in one place. In the past, 
I’ve always looked forward to new beginnings as a way 
to reset my personality and start over. Instead, I need 
to learn how to ride the emotional ebbs and flows that 
come with living in one location for a long time and 
seeing I’ve been able to grow over time. Being able to 
say you are from somewhere speaks volumes to your 
identity and comfort as an individual. In the future, I 
hope I can answer “where are you from?” a little more 
simply.

Maxwell Barnes is studying Communication and Media 

in LSA and is a Daily Staff Writer for Arts. He can be 
reached at mxwell@umich.edu.

Confessions from a real-estate brat

BY MAXWELL BARNES, STATEMENT CONTRIBUTOR

ILLUSTRATION BY

 CHRISTINE JEGARL

