Ever since I started writing “I Reckon,” I’ve wanted to dedicate at least one piece to the place that was my reckoning muse: Georgia. It is always on my mind, even if the state and all of its people and politicians couldn’t care any less about me.

During the law school fair a few weeks ago, I went in search of the only school’s table I couldn’t leave without seeing: the University of Georgia. It took me a while because there wasn’t a UGA-branded tablecloth vying for my attention. 

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When I finally found the table, the representative knew the exact town and surrounding areas I grew up in, and after a good conversation and a very hearty “Go Dawgs,” I walked away feeling more than reassured that I was doing the right thing by putting UGA on my law school list. 

For a minute during the conversation, all of my fears about going back to the place I called home for so many years disappeared. I was excited to finally be able to talk to someone who didn’t need me to explain where Lawrenceville was. 

There’s something about being known in a small town, where life would be peaceful and quiet, that excited me. That’s when I realized I’m looking for a future that doesn’t exist. I remembered the reasons I left in the first place.

What a way to put a damper on things, I know. But it’s true. The reasons I left are personal, but also economical. Divorce and the relative affordability that came with living with family in California made the Golden State an easy alternative for my folks, even in spite of how expensive it’s considered to live here. I know many families like mine, who left the state for better opportunities or education elsewhere, and those folks hardly come home. 

Like so many other southern states and rural communities, Georgia suffers from a phenomenon known as “brain drain,” in which states suffer from both a failure to retain their highly-educated population and a failure to attract any new talent to compensate for who they’ve lost.

As much as I write as if I was the authority on all things Southern, I’m really not. I am one of many voices that find themselves talking about a region from which they’re relatively far removed. Nor is the South the only region to experience brain drain, especially when there are political and social storms blowing back home for almost all of us these days, no matter where home is. 

Many of the things we take for granted here are slow to sprout in the South, and that stagnation and backsliding can keep even the most homesick among us from having second thoughts about returning. For those who can’t afford private health insurance, the fact that seven of the 10 states that haven’t adopted Medicaid’s expanded coverage guidelines are in the South might do the trick in steering starry-eyed former Southerners away from home.

If you’re concerned about your rights to access safe abortions, you might as well keep clear of Texas, especially since many of its local communities are becoming enamored with the idea of restricting a person’s travel to obtain such a procedure.

I could go on and on, but I know I don’t have to. You know just as well as I do what’s going on, from El Paso to Key West and everywhere in between. It lives in between every single line of “I Reckon,” every initial thought of a non-Southerner when they hear the most outlandish policies being proposed seemingly every other week. It exists in the hesitancy that I have to return.

Everyone has their own South, the place they credit with almost all that they have. But many of these places aren’t exactly the most welcoming to who they are, or what they believe in. In moving back, isolation is almost guaranteed, at least for a bit.

Beyond the isolation is the beauty of finding your own community and building connections to people who believe in a better South, rural Northeast or wherever else you’re from. Beyond your hesitation is a world that you can either play an essential role in shaping, or simply watch decay into something you’ll hardly recognize in a few decades.

It is natural to leave the nest and spread your wings for better winds. But like a bird on its migration path, we all must come home after a while. 

As for me, the mountains are calling, and I must go home. 

Quynh Anh Nguyen is a senior writing about the implications of current Southern political events. Her column, “I Reckon,” has run for four semesters and this is the final installment.