Leaving Home: Stories about having to leave in order to find home

This week we present two stories of people who had to leave home to find a new home.

Part 1: When Ph.D student Ali Mattu's girlfriend tells him she is moving to New York City, he has to make some tough decisions about where home is.

Ali Mattu is a cognitive behavioral therapist who helps kids and adults with anxiety disorders. Through YouTube, Dr. Mattu teaches a global audience how to use psychological science to achieve their goals. He’s created over 100 videos for his YouTube channel, The Psych Show, which have been seen over 1,400,00 million times. He has been interviewed by the New York Times, appeared on Buzzfeed, MTV, CBS, NBC, PBS, and has the honor of being referenced, and not made fun of, on HBO’s Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. Dr. Mattu is a licensed clinical psychologist and was an assistant professor at the Columbia University Irving Medical Center in New York City. He presently serves on the Board of Directors of The Story Collider and creates curriculum for the Pop Culture Hero Coalition. He has served in a variety of leadership roles within the American Psychological Association.

Part 2: Arlo Pérez Esquivel struggles to define his boundaries with his father while he is pursuing his education in another country.

Arlo Pérez Esquivel was raised in Mexico until the age of 16, when he left for the United States. There, he moved across multiple states, and lived in the homes of different friends and relatives in order to finish his education. During this constant movement, Arlo developed a passion for street photography. His work attempts to investigate the “sense of place” by capturing people, their environment, and the relationship between the two. He is now a Digital Associate Producer for NOVA on PBS, currently working on a ten-part digital series on how life and science are done in Antarctica.

Episode Transcript

Part 1: Ali Mattu

Back in 2008, I was a PhD student getting my PhD in Clinical Psychology down in Washington DC. I was always living in fear of being found out as not really having supposed to get into grad school. Like they were going to figure out that I didn’t really know statistics or I wasn’t smart enough to make it work. But I always felt like I fit in in DC. I would ride the subway and just feel so at home looking at everyone else reading their whitepapers, their policy briefs, reading talking points about Congressional Hill visits. Like DC is a very nerdy city and I knew I was a big nerd. I just felt so at home there.

And then my favorite thing to do in DC was have Chinese dinner with my girlfriend Nhu-An. The two of us were high school sweethearts. We met in high school in California and we sort of both worked our way to the East Coast, and every Friday we’d get together.

And so I’m taking the subway up and enjoying everyone reading the whitepapers as I’m reading my academic journal articles, and I arrive at Hunan Manor. It’s this gigantic Chinese restaurant. It’s beautiful inside. There are these gigantic aquariums. They have a Koi pond inside the restaurant. And the smell of the sizzling pans just always made me feel so comfortable.

So my girlfriend and I, Nhu-An, she sits across and I sit down and I say, “How was your week?”

Ali Mattu shares his story with the Story Collider audience at Caveat in New York City in September 2019. Photo by Zhen Qin.

She says, “I got laid off.”

And I go, “Oh, I’m sorry. What happened?”

She goes, “It doesn’t matter.”

And I go, “Okay. Yeah, I know. I mean you're going to find another job.”

She goes, “No, I’m not. I’m going to leave biomedical engineering.”

And I go, “Okay. So this thing you studied for like six years you're just going to leave it?”

And she goes, “Yeah. I don't like it anymore.”

I go, “Okay. What are you going to do?”

And she goes, “I don't know.”

I’m like, “Okay.”

This is making me getting my PhD very panicked here. You're supposed to go to school to do that thing.

She goes, “I don't know what I’m going to do but I do know I’m going to move to New York City.”

And I go, “Okay.” Then I lean in, I grab her hand, and I say, “As soon as I can, baby, I’m moving up there with you.”

And she smiles. We have our dinner. What she doesn’t realize is, inside, I am panicking. I am panicking because New York City is full of stylish people doing important things who have all their shit together and I’m this cargo pants-wearing PhD student who’s trying to figure out how to make his dataset work so he can finish off his dissertation.

I don't tell her any of those things. She moves up to New York and I've got about two more years of course work before I can leave the city, so I bury that panic deep inside.

Now that Nhu-An is gone, the thing that I look forward to most in DC is hanging out with my roommate at home. His name is Lowen Baumgarten. I've known him since fourth grade. Apparently, I have a very small group of people who I know for many years that I just stick with them. But I've known him for a long time and we live in this townhouse in Washington DC.

I live in the third floor, which is actually a converted attic. I barely even fit inside. There's only very small corners of the room I fit in, because it’s a slanted roof, but I wanted that room so badly. Because when I saw it, I was like, “I have wanted to live in this kind or room ever since I watched Growing Pains and Mike Seaver had that like waterbed in this converted attic. This is that ultimate ‘80s older brother sitcom room and I’m taking it.”

So I would live there and my buddy Lowen, he would knock on the door and I'd be like, “Yeah,” and then he’d sort of walk up in the stairs that are like in the middle of the room and he would emerge. And we would hang out and we would talk late into the night about everything. About politics and PR, because that’s what he did, and psychology and mental health, because that’s what I did. And then most of our conversations came back to Star Trek because we were both big Trekkies.

In 2009 J.J. Abrams rebooted Star Trek. He made this new film and we spent so much time debating it, talking about it. Is it good for the franchise? Is it bad? What about the fan reaction? Is it a parallel universe or did they change the prime universe and now all of Star Trek is undone? What does that mean for my DVD collection downstairs? I don't know.

So we debated all this stuff. We ultimately came down on this is good for the franchise. That was my perspective. It needed a refresh. And Lowen’s perspective was, “You know, J.J. Abrams basically just made his version of a Star Wars film, but that’s totally fine because they're never going to make another Star Wars movie.”

Eventually, I worked up the guts to tell Lowen about my panic about moving to New York. It was 2010. I was finishing my coursework. I was going to have to make that jump this year. I tell him about it. Lowen has lived in New York City for a summer so he's got some experience with this place.

And he thinks about it in his Lowen way. You can almost see the neurons firing in his head as he's thinking. And he goes, “You know, the thing you got to remember about New York is Seinfeld. Just think about Seinfeld, man. Because like New York City is so big it’s got enough room for all those cast of characters. All those people can fit in New York City so I’m sure you can too.”

So he walks downstairs and it actually made me feel better because I started thinking about George Costanza. My very first cellphone that I ever had, the voicemail for it was the George Costanza answering machine message. You guys remember this? The, “Du-du-du-du-du-du, believe it or not, George isn’t at home so leave a message at the beep.”

That was my voicemail. I didn’t even change it to, “Ali Mattu is not at home.” I just let it play George Costanza. It must have been really confusing for people who didn’t know me.

But I loved George Costanza. . And I thought about George and how anxious he was and how not cool he was and he somehow made it work in New York. So if he could make it work then Ali Mattu could make it work.

I move up to New York in 2010, the summer of 2010. I move into a 400-square foot studio next to a power plant. It happens to be two blocks away from Nhu-An’s apartment which is a mouse-infested fourth floor walkup, so life is pretty great.

Someone named Anne Marie Albano, this like world-renowned psychologist at Columbia, she takes pity on me and she brings me into her clinic. And all that feeling of not fitting in, of New York City people being so important and so cool and so good at what they were, it’s coming up with me working with Anne Marie.

And so I’m trying to be very professional, very on top of my stuff. I have all my notes ready for my supervision sessions and all of that. And then I start to see this patient who’s really into anime. He's this 14-year-old kid. Really into anime. Yeah, anime. Not for me. I knew nothing about it.

So I was freaking out because that’s all he wanted to talk about. He didn’t want to talk about his mental health. He just wanted to talk about anime. So I’m really panicking again.

I go up to Anne Marie and I tell her the whole story and she says, “Ali, use it. Understand it. Watch some anime. Bring it into your therapy. If you can do that then your therapy is going to have so much more of an impact than anything else you could ever do.”

This is not what I was expecting her to say and so I started doing that. He was really into Naruto and so I started watching Naruto, and then I stopped watching Naruto because there's like 900 episodes or something. So I’m like, “I’m not going to do this.” I read the Wikipedia article for Naruto.

But we made some progress and it made me feel a little bit more comfortable with Anne Marie. And I started telling her more things, more geeky things and then she started dropping references to Tribbles and to The Force, and she started talking about Ghostbusters and not crossing the streams. I had never seen Ghostbusters so she totally called me out in a gigantic staff meeting with all these important psychologists and stuff. Super embarrassing.

But I started to weave in that to my work. I started, just like those conversations I had with Lowen, I started to take the passions of all my patients as seriously as I took their challenges. And I started to do more of that and I started to become known as the ‘Sci-Fi Psychologist’.

And I learned about parasocial relationships and how important the relationships that we have with people we've never even met or fictional characters, how important those relationships are and how we can use them to heal.

So in my quest to gain more cultural competence on nerdy things, I went to a Nerd Nite event. Now, I dragged Nhu-An to this. She did not want to go. And I was expecting it to be like in the back of a library with a projector and these nerds like just doing these academic style talks. And it was not that. It was at the Galapagos Art Space in Brooklyn, like with the Brooklyn Bridge and Manhattan Bridge in the background. This beautiful space you walk inside, there's like a lake inside this balcony seating beautiful lighting.

And these talks that are so amazing. They were like TED Talks for nerds. And one of the talks was featuring Anna from Fashion It So which was a blog about Star Trek fashion. And she's talked about culture and history and art and the Skant, which is the male skirt from Star Trek: The Next Generation. So only in a few episodes. But I didn’t expect it to be so beautiful and interesting and for Nhu-An to have an amazing time. I needed to do this.

And so I did. I did a Nerd Nite talk about Star Trek’s utopian future and how we’re never going to achieve it unless we almost destroy ourselves. And I did a talk about all the nerd rage after Ben Affleck was cast as Batman. And I threw those in the internet.

And then I got an email from a producer at CBS who said, “Hey, that Nerd Nite talk, can you come in to CBS headquarters? I'd like to talk to you about that.”

I got on to CBS’ 48 Hours and explained how people can get really interested in videogames and parallel that to like bowling leagues and how people are interested in bowling leagues. And I started to learn like this was a skill that people cared about. If you can tie in the stuff that they love and help people understand stuff, like this is a thing.

So CBS led to MTV Teen Mom which - thank you. Got a fan of Teen Mom here - which led to an appearance on PBS, which led to John Oliver making fun of my appearance on PBS on Last Week Tonight which led to a series on A&E which is now leading to this thing on Netflix that’s coming out.

You know, I moved here thinking that I was so weird and that I would never fit in. I realize that no one is weird in New York City because everything you're interested in, someone else in New York is interested in that thing too. So if you really think about it, no one is really weird.

New York City gave me my voice and all of you gave me the confidence to share that voice with the world. New York City has given me so much. The one thing it can’t give me is it can’t give my wife Nhu-An and our daughter grandparents. It can’t give her uncles or aunts or nephews or nieces or cousins. And so we’re leaving New York in three weeks. We’re heading back to where we grew up, San Francisco Bay Area. I leave now with no fear, no worries, only gratitude for what this city has given me. Thank you.

Part 2: Arlo Pérez Esquivel

I’m 13 years old and I’m running away from home for the first time. I’m walking down one of the main streets of my hometown in Michoacan, Mexico and my only plan is to put as much distance between my father and myself as I possibly can. And the only thing running through my mind is the argument we just had a couple of hours ago.

It was a stupid argument. Most of our arguments were stupid. It boiled down to this. I thought it was a great time to kind of remodel my room and move some furniture down to the basement. He didn’t, and he told me so. But I did it anyway.

So that is part of the truth but, to be fair, there is a whole context behind it and that is there are three factors that really contributed to this. One, my brother Dante had just moved out to the U.S. and he was the Golden Boy. He actually would stop the fights before they actually happened.

Two, my mom was in the U.S. visiting family and my dad always got in kind of high alert when she wasn’t around. I think he was pretty certain that my aunt would kind of poison my mom’s thoughts and convince her to leave him, so it wasn’t the best state of mind. And third, and probably the biggest contributing factor, my parents had just been called in last week about a certain YouTube video that I may or may not have been involved it. They had been told that it was “así de cerca” from being expelled.

So my dad gets home and it’s just like a match hitting gasoline, just [makes popping and whooshing sound] and he just explodes. He starts shouting which in turn causes me to start shouting. And before I even know how it happened, I’m on the floor being pinned by a grown man.

Arlo Pérez Esquivel shares his story with the Story Collider audience at Oberon Theater in Boston, MA in October 2019. Photo by Kate Flock.

So I’m running away from home. That’s kind of what you do, right? Like at this point. We fight all the time but I’m not usually being pinned down by the end of it. So what should I do? In any sense like is it actually me? Why did I move the furniture in the first place? There wasn’t any real reason. And why am I doing so bad at school? Like why am I being a fuck-up? Why am I not more like my brother?

And I’m thinking all these things and my plan is seeming dumber and dumber and dumber. I mean I only have the clothes that I have on me. I barely have any money and I don't know where I’m going.

So by the time I get to the end of the street, I say to myself, “This is stupid. This is pointless. My dad is going to have to come find me and he's going to be angry at the end.” So I just turn around and start walking back.

I start heading to my parents’ pizzeria, which is already the place I would spend most of my afternoons after school. I'd like to say that I was there to help my parents out, but in reality I was just either watching TV or reading the four Harry Potter books that were out at the time. Both of them, though, in English.

As my dad would proudly say, “Escuchalo. No tiene acento. He doesn’t have an accent.”

He would usually be telling this to the employees which were mostly single mothers, most of which they don’t have even a high school education, a fact that my brother and my father would tell me made them better employees. “La necesidad, Arlo. They need this job. They're not likely to just leave it.”

So as I arrive to the pizzeria, I’m still thinking about all these things, whether I should leave, whether I should stay, and I don't even notice that I walked right by my dad. But once I got to the cash register, I noticed that he's putting up a sign in the storefront. A two-for-one deal at Feta Di Venezia.

Even at this age, the contrast between my father, a man who, as the saying goes in Mexico, “Tieno un Nopal la frente.” That is to say his Mexicanness is just so apparent that all that is missing is a Nopal cactus dangling from his forehead.

And this sign that he's putting up, ‘Feta De Venezia’, a slice of Venice, no one in my family has ever been to Venice.

So my dad proudly finished putting up the sign and he looks at it and just starts walking back and I realize he's avoiding my gaze. I knew that we were never going to talk about it. I knew that there wasn’t going to be an apology. I knew that we just expect to kind of sweep it under the rug. Although I had just come back to the pizzeria, I knew that I couldn’t stay there.

The second time that I ran away from home, I’m 16 years old. And this time it’s a little less poetic than last time. I’m actually being driven there. I’m sitting in the back of my dad’s truck and I’m just watching the city go by me. And I’m looking at it, I’m looking at the buildings with the streetlamps as though it’s the last time I’m going to see this and I’m so happy. I know that tomorrow I’m going to be in Oregon and, a month from now, I’m going to be studying in an American high school. It feels like I've been waiting for this my entire life.

And we get to the airport and the goodbyes start. My mom comes to me and gives me this big hug and she starts whispering in my ear childhood stories, like a plea for me to please remember her by. And she starts telling me about the time she would take me to the National Park and the times that she will read me bedtime stories and the times that we would escape, we would sneak out of the house and go eat tamales and pozole, and I just start feeling so guilty. Why am I leaving? Am I actually just a spoiled brat who doesn’t appreciate what he has?

And I don't want to leave her. Not with him.

And then she tells me something that she's told me all my life. “Lo tienes que perdonar.” “You have to forgive your father. He loves you. He just doesn’t know how to show it.”

And I look at my mom and I look at my dad and I remember how just a couple of months ago he took me by the arm and took me to a closet and locked the closet behind him and started demanding that I confess how my mother had been cheating on him for time and time again. I don't know what the fuck he's talking about but every single time I say no, he just gets angrier and more violent and shakes me.

And then my mom’s words ring again. “You have to forgive him. He loves you. He just doesn’t know how to show it.”

And I look at my mom again and I wonder this woman that’s been abandoned by her father at a very young age, who all she's ever wanted in life has been a family, how many times has she said those words to herself? How many times she's going to continue saying those words to herself?

I get on the plane. Before I do that, I give a last hug to my mom. I shake my dad’s hand and I get on the plane and say, “I’m never going to come back.”

But I do. Just a few months later, in fact. I started coming back for the holidays. I'd like to say it was just because of my mom but, in reality, I felt completely tethered to my dad. While I was living in Mexico, I would tell people that I didn’t care what he thought about me but, as soon as I left, I started sending back my grades. I started sending back my artwork, my awards. I started calling home and trying to talk to him about my social life, telling him how I was doing better at school, how everything was improving. I thought that somehow this would create a connection with him, how somehow he would start seeing me the same way that he saw my brother, but it never worked. In fact, things got worse.

Then one time I’m 19 and I’m back for holiday break and we’re having breakfast. And I can’t stand the way that he's talking to my mom so I say something, some objection. And he shushes me, just, “Shht,” the same sound he would make to shoo away a dog. And I just see red.

I completely snap. I get up. I grab a plate. I threw it into the ground and I start shouting just nonsense, just drowning out the “pinche cabrones” that are coming from his mouth and my fists are completely ready.

And I would like to say that I calmed down, that I sat back down and that we talked it through, but that isn’t what happened. In fact, I don't know what would have happened if my brother hadn’t been there. I don’t know what would’ve happened if he hadn’t pinned me down, if I hadn’t cut my foot on a piece of plate.

Later that night after the stitches, my brother walks into my room and he sits on my bed. He doesn’t even turn on the light. Then he says, “Arlo, tienes que parar esto. You have to stop this. This is getting worse and worse. And your father is getting older. And I’m afraid that one of these days you're going to end up killing him.”

So I changed my flight to the next day and I stopped coming back for the holidays. Ironically, that actually improved the relationship between my father and I. We started talking about things that we had mutual interest in. He would ask me, for example, “How’s the car,” or, “Have you changed the oil lately,” or, “Do you still remember how to change the spark plugs like I taught you?”

This went on for some time and it kind of just became our normal. And during that time, I got into college and graduated from college, being the second person to do it in my family. At 25, I got a job at a place that I actually cared about, a job that I was actually passionate about. I got to help make documentaries to teach people science, and that is incredible.

And in that job I got an opportunity of a lifetime. Last June, I was told that I was going to Antarctica. I couldn’t even believe it. In one of those rare instances in which reality surpasses expectation, just a month later I find myself standing in the middle of a frozen lake with these incredible, massive mountains all around me and in front of me this beautiful, blue glacier that is bleeding red, actually oozing this red fluid.

And we just got on break after interviewing the scientist who explained to us what is going on with this glacier and I feel overwhelmed and I feel that I need to tell someone, to talk to them about this experience.

So I get the Iridium Phone, a phone that you could call anywhere using satellite reception. And I dial the only phone number that I know from heart, my parents’ pizzeria. 5-2-8-2-5-7-2 and I’m calling home.

My dad picks up and I can barely hear him. The reception is terrible. And I start telling him I’m so excited. I start telling him the things that I've seen and how much this means to me and how few people get to experience this.

I don't know from the conversation I was expecting a ‘I’m proud of you’. I don't know if I was expecting an ‘I love you’. But instead he starts telling me how they're using a new cheese for the pizzas.

You know, when I was a kid, I used to think that I wanted to put as much distance between myself and my father. It was only as an adult that I started realizing that that was not the case. I actually wanted to be seen by my father, to have some sort of connection, to be treated the same way that he treated my brother.

And I ran away and didn’t find that at the end of the street. I ran away to another country and didn’t find it there. And I had run to the end of the world and I still hadn’t found it. I still hadn’t found any sense of resolution, any way to solve the growing chasm between my father and myself.

So as I’m sitting there, this call, this broken conversation that I’m having with my father, a conversation that is spanning thousands and thousands of miles that is only possible through the perfect alignment of military satellites, a conversation about cheese and cars, I realize that this might be the best thing I ever get and that I had to find a way to be okay with that. Thank you.