The following explanation might confuse you, but that’s OK. Stick with me anyway.

My friend Carmen recently wrote a guest post on her friend Kristin’s blog, Halfway to Normal. Kristin launched something she calls the Love List Project, which is a wonderful idea: make a list of the things you love, consider why you love them, then share what you love and why on Twitter and on her blog. Check out her explanation to learn more.
The Love List Project deserves its own post but that’s not what we’re talking about today. Instead, it’s Carmen’s guest contribution to the Love List Project, an essay about how Iowa changed her life.
Got it? Carmen is my friend, and I’m quoting something she wrote for her friend’s blog on my blog.
Here are some tasty little snippets of what Carmen wrote:

I moved in the fall of 1990, when I was 20, a junior in college. I had just spent the summer in Italy and had a week to pack up and move to Iowa City. My dad drove me in the truck 391 miles from Grand Rapids, Michigan down around Chicago and west on I-80, to Church Street and Dubuque at the bank of the Iowa River. There I was, plopped down of my own volition.
I soon learned that Iowa City was a Mecca for all of the whip-smart misfits who didn’t exactly blend with their farm towns. Anyone gay, anyone artistic, anyone who wanted out or wanted more came there. You could find them at Prairie Lights Books. Breugger’s Bagels. Great Midwestern Coffee Shop. At the Deadwood, half biker bar, half student hang, the juke box spit out the Pretenders and the bartender shouted out their names—Michael!….John!—when they received calls on the payphone.
In Iowa City I first realized that I could land in a cornfield to study something as obscure and unmarketable in my rustbelt town as Italian literature. I could dream up a plan and make it happen. There was nothing so empowering.
Years later I would use what I learned in Iowa to propel me to New York. The city would be a much tougher landing, but the drill was the same. Pick up that sweet little life and push ahead to what you want.
I still love that quirky town in the middle of Iowa because it showed me that I could be whoever I wanted to be.

I have written before about choosing a hometown wisely. Carmen’s story takes that idea in a different direction, in that she was young and didn’t really know what she was getting into when she arrived in Iowa, and yet, it changed her for the good.
I encourage you, nay I beseech you, to read Carmen’s whole story in its entirety here. It’s a beautiful tale of finding yourself by finding your tribe and by discovering your own inner strength.