a collection of places.

When you introduce yourself to a new group, what are some of the basic things you say?

Normally, you start with your name and where you live. You might throw in your age and what you do for work (or what you’re studying in school), depending on the nature of the group you’re in. You might need to give a dreaded fun fact or have to contribute an answer to an ice-breaker question. Maybe you want to talk about how you love the ocean or that you’re a daughter, brother, wife, uncle, stepmom, fill in the blank. There might be a world of other things you want to say, but you usually won’t, unless you get the chance to dive deeper on an individual level.

But what do you always say? Your name and where you live.

I find this fascinating. Places are such an integral part of our identity and we use them as a way to say, “You might know (or assume) XYZ about me because I’m from [region, state, country].” The places that we are from and the places that we live shape who we are. They shape the way we talk, the way we relate to others, our mannerisms, the things we value, possibly even our moral compass. Without getting too deep into the nature versus nurture argument, I think it’s safe to say that our environments play a huge factor in who we are and who we become. It’s an identifying piece of our humanity. My name is Courtney Zanosky and I live in western Colorado. I say it in the same breath as I say my own name. I am.

I currently live in a small town about four hours west of Denver, thirty miles from the Utah border. I haven’t always lived here. Before I lived in the middle of nowhere, I lived in the heart of somewhere—Hollywood. Before the five years I spent in southern California, I lived on Long Island. And before that, northern New Jersey, for eighteen years. All of these places are a part of me. I’ve collected the houses, apartments, neighborhoods, and cities that I’ve inhabited like the collection of moose figurines that used to line the shelves of my New Jersey home, the home I grew up in.

It’s been six years since I’ve lived on the East Coast. And yet…

The other day, I went to UPS to mail back an old iPad and iPhone to my company’s warehouse in Scranton, PA. The girl that was helping me with the transaction looked to be about my age and we were just making some small talk and chatting as she was entering the information I gave her and estimating weights. When she got to the zip code, she looked up at me and asked, “That’s Scranton, right?”

I nodded and said, “You must see a lot of zip codes!” She laughed and told me that she grew up outside of the Scranton area and only recently moved here. Immediately I felt a kinship to this girl. Not for any other reason besides we were both from the East Coast and had transplanted ourselves here, to this interstate town that’s more a passing thought than destination to most people. She was my people. She was someone who could understand why I almost cried the time that the salesperson at the local Zales had fixed my broken watch battery for free or the time the cashier at Golden Gate had given me free coffee for bringing my own tumbler. The generosity here, on such a routine basis, was the stuff I’d only ever seen in the movies. She was also someone who could understand why my leg starts instinctively bouncing whenever the person in front of me in line at the grocery store is chatting to the grocer for too long, someone who could understand why I walk at twice the pace of most of my friends here.

The East Coast is an identity just like anywhere else. And that identity has been coded into me. I knew she had it, too. I told her I grew up in New Jersey and she immediately turned into an East Coaster. “Yooooo! You get it, then!” We were bonded. We started joking about how different it was around here. “A different world entirely,” she said. We talked about the different types of names—how everyone back East had names that sounded like they were destined to work in corporate America. We talked about the pace of living, the lack of diversity, the beauty.

At one point, she made a couple of mistakes in the number-entering and I pointed them out on the screen. She just kind of glanced up at me and made the comment that she was surprised at how nice I was, given that I grew up in New Jersey. I felt a moment of betrayal—wanting to defend where I was from. It was like the flip had switched somehow, like suddenly we were reading from the same page but not the same sentence. We were in the same region, but not the same state. It’s far from the first time that I’ve had this kind of reaction to saying I’m from Jersey and then doing something kind. Usually when I say where I’m from, it’s met with, “I’m sorry.” I’ll always defend that state. It’s my blood. New Jersey is like a little secret that I’ll only whisper to the people that I know can keep it.

When I left, she complimented my earrings and I walked out, probably to never see her again. We had our moment of becoming different people for a few minutes—two kids growing up in New Jersey and Scranton. We got to live as a different version of us for a little bit. And perhaps that’s why I think places are so important. They carry the shadows of all our past selves.

I loved that interaction. I’ll always love interactions like that. I find the interaction between places and people to be so deeply intriguing. There is so much wrapped up in the places that make our lives and we either wear them as a badge of pride or a source of shame, disappointment. We either spend our lives running from them or trying to get back. Either way, they’re with us for the long-haul.

Maybe if I had grown up in western Colorado, this blue-collar town with generous and kind-hearted people, instead of “the armpit of America,” my life would have been different. But I don’t really care to know. I am a Jersey girl at heart, even though I’ve loved finding peace and solace in slowing down and exploring the rural West. I love it almost as equally as I loved the diversity and charm of my Los Feliz neighborhood. I wouldn’t trade any of the places I’ve lived, or rearrange them in a different order, specifically because they made me who I am at a time when I needed to become that person. We become part of the ecosystems of the places that we live. And they become us in exchange, too.

My name is Courtney and I live in western Colorado. But that will never be the full story. And I can’t wait to keep writing more.