The wise John Green wrote, “The town was paper, but the memories were not.”
When I was a sophomore in high school, I picked up a copy of Green’s "Paper Towns," and it felt like every sentiment of disappointment and resentment I felt toward my hometown had finally been put into words. As I thumbed through the age-old tale of teenagers searching to find themselves, I discovered that, just like the protagonist Quentin, I also grew up in a Paper Town — a town that felt as though one gust of wind would sweep it all away.
Needless to say, it was a place I was hell-bent on escaping from.
Once I escaped my Paper Town, I thought I’d be free to live my life and never look back to the place I had spent so long planning to leave.
But life on the other side wasn’t as glamorous as I expected it to be. If I’m being completely honest here, just a few months after I left my Paper Town, I found myself at the Fullerton beach on the first day of spring looking out across the seemingly endless Lake Michigan holding back tears. I missed my Paper Town, but not for the reasons that you would imagine.
I desperately wanted to relive the sleepless nights I spent dreaming of a brighter future, the laughs I belted out, and the people who challenged me and helped mold me into who I am now. I was reaching for memories that felt like home, memories that inspired me. Before I knew it nostalgia was getting the best of me and no matter how hard I tried to hold onto the disdain that had driven me to leave in the first place, I just couldn’t do it.
I couldn’t do it and here’s why: You can’t let go of things that are quintessential to the person you have become. Of course you can attempt to run away from them, but the truth is you can’t escape where you come from no matter how hard you try.
We can hate where we come from whether it’s corn fields, an overflowing city, or a Paper Town nestled between California mountain ranges, but here’s the thing — if you take a step back, you’ll find that, despite the hopelessness that these Paper Towns inflict, they are home to our most valuable, life-altering memories. And the truth is that the memories we have and the people we loved and the way we felt are the furthest thing from "Paper." They are the realest, most palpable things we have to our name, and whether we like it or not, these memories that are so vital to who we are originated from the paper houses and paper walls that we feared would keep us enclosed in our treacherous Paper Town.
When I finally learned to embrace my Paper Town in all its notorious glory, things changed. I stopped running, and I started realizing that the person I am now and the person I wished to become were both ideas that I dreamed up because of my Paper Town.
I realized somewhere along the lines that, while Paper Towns have a habit of making you feel trapped, there is a silver lining to their existence. When you grow up in a Paper Town, you are a special type of breed. You’re a fighter, a dreamer, someone who doesn’t take no for an answer. You spend so much time trying to get out that you don’t realize that if it weren’t for your Paper Town you wouldn’t have had anything to fight for, you wouldn’t have wanted to strive for something better, something more than who you were in that moment.
When the world puts you in a Paper Town, it’s testing you. Paper Towns don’t have expectations. As Green so eloquently put it, they are filled with “streets that turn in on themselves and houses that were built to fall apart.” They feel like hopeless mazes you’ll never escape, but the truth is they don’t have to be your end all, be all. If you let yourself see past the paper walls, you’ll discover that growing up in a Paper Town is an invitation to make something grand and extraordinary of yourself.
I’m fortunate that I have a Paper Town to thank for teaching me how to overcome life’s obstacles and, most importantly, for being the home to all of my most profound and life changing memories.
