When I travel, and people ask where I am from, San Francisco can sound pretty exotic – depending on where you’re standing. In Madagascar, the average person has no idea where to find it on a map, primarily because their only exposure to America is usually thrice-copied DVDs of Arnold Schwarzenegger pulverizing someone (handy however, when describing our California governor and penchant for violence).  I definitely don’t fault them, because more likely than not, I hadn’t heard of their village either. In the UK, you get the worst and best kind – those that have been there and reel out all the famous landmarks – Alcatraz! The Golden Gate Bridge! Really Big Hills! Or you get your usual lout that shouts out the ignorant homophobic slur that comes from not getting out of the pub enough.

At any rate, when I left the San Francisco Bay Area at twenty years old, vowing not to come back in this lifetime, I was pretty fed up and not a little hopeful.  I’m sure there was some post-teenage angst and college delusion involved, but I hungered for somewhere grand and expansive - determinedly less provincial. Think exotic Moroccan souks and London taxicabs rather than deflowered hippies and SUV-driving Baby Boomers. I eventually got myself out to a few continents and made the rounds, never once thinking I would ever glance back.

When I was offered a job in Washington, D.C. in 2005, people marveled how I could pick up, move and start a job in three days. Only recently back in California after living abroad, I shrugged and said naively, “They speak English, right? It can’t be that hard.”

Oh, how wrong I was. The East Coast is not the West Coast, and that separation of say, 2,819 miles, actually counts for something. Though having its own charms (and great music), it was almost stranger than winding up in a village in Africa. I guess because I had expected the people to think the same, act the same, and generally see me as the same. First off, my clothes were viewed as neither “thrift store chic” nor nouveau côtier, when the dress code for parties was ‘business casual’ (I mean, a dress code for parties? Come on.). My dancing antics at gatherings left the conservative girls aghast and the boys awkwardly gazing at their navels. The fluffy snow on the sidewalk was charming for a day, until the sleet and wind, its brutal brothers, soon followed. Then it became a daily dance with death. It seemed that every restaurant menu in D.C. was given the unpalatable description of ‘fusion’ that – translated – meant that I could never find a decent burrito anywhere. Misery never lasted that long in my life, not even in England. How could you pay that high a rent for so much bad weather? That was the winter of my discontent – pure cold, ice and expensive footwear with no end in sight.

I may be exaggerating a touch, but that one definitely got filed under lessons learned. Now I am back in San Francisco, and after twelve years away, the city has changed - but not as much, it seems, as I have. Going and returning has been a strange, circular journey, where each time I get a little closer to the nest. In my earlier visits home, I would only stay for a couple of weeks before extricating myself from the New Age airiness, dog-toting yuppies and pseudo-hipsters once again. But suddenly, about six months ago, I returned and put myself back in the middle of things. And what I discovered was humbling: I was a California girl through and through.

This hasn’t been easy to admit. Okay, perhaps I had seen some things, learned some things, got a bit wiser and a bit more resourceful while away, but my mentality, my zaniness, my pestering optimism and my love of water never left me. I realized in my time away, that I had become more of a hippy than all the hippies on Haight Street. Perhaps I did not go to Zen retreats and was bad at practicing my tai chi, but my approach to life, my love of beach, mountain and Pacifica radio was hiding out, dormant all these years, in my DNA. I also found an easy home to my activism and advocacy that had grown over the years- a trait inherent in San Francisco. People here are informed, aware, irreverent and great pot-stirrers (no pun intended). Even the mayor, Gavin Newsom, has done is share of protesting in the streets.

What I’ve learned through my hundreds of comings and goings, is that it is okay to feel an easy kind of belonging. That actually it’s perfectly all right if someone gets you the first time around. That may sound strange, but for a girl who has lived for years trying to make herself understood in foreign cultures, it came as a revelation. In my refusal to acknowledge my ties to California, I was denying the experience of knowing myself.

When I was growing up, and my mother used to accuse me of being just like my mercurial Irish father, I would vehemently deny it. Now, when I sit in the garden with him over a Guinness, I couldn’t imagine anything better. As it is with California: we are cut from the same cloth, and though it may not be exactly exotic, it feels pretty good – from where I’m standing.