Flip side to Maine’s brain-drain dilemma

As Democrats from my home state began to stream into newly fortified Boston for their party’s national convention this week, my mother, ever the Maine cheerleader, called from North Haven with an idea. She suggested I head over to the state delegation’s hotel and make my feelings known about the Maine brain drain and Augusta’s gathering concern over attracting and retaining young people. But when I showed up in the clubby lobby of The Colonnade Hotel, temporary quarters to the delegation this week, I couldn’t help but feel like an outsider, even among fellow Mainers.

I grew up on a tiny island, a craggy, lupine-dotted paradise a dozen miles off the spectacular Midcoast where people from Boston and New York today spend millions to build lavish homes and experience the same lazy and simple idyllic way of life that was mine when I was a child. I left all this five years ago to attend college in a decided backwater on the fringes of the American Rust Belt, a departure that was probably as much about my own need to develop a distinct self-identity and about getting to know the world beyond small-town Maine as it was about getting an education.

After graduation last year, degree in hand, I didn’t return to Maine. My decision to move instead to Boston wasn’t affected by Maine’s lack of jobs, its increasingly unaffordable housing stock, or the general malaise of the economy. The hard-to-swallow truth is that I didn’t return to Maine – because despite its sane pace of life and the romance of its foggy, majestic landscape, a serene aesthetic I desperately missed during college – it isn’t the right place for everyone.

Right now it seems to be too little excitement and too many limitations.

As a 22-year-old college-educated Mainer living in Massachusetts, I typify those being targeted by Gov. John Baldacci and his new stop-loss order, a hopeful attempt to stem the tide of young people migrating toward more job- and culture-rich places nationwide.

But unlike the twenty-somethings being acknowledged by the brain drain task forces, I’m one of the young Mainers whose decision to stay or leave is not prompted by external factors like housing and jobs but by the deep-seated human need for self-exploration, the kind that is ultimately difficult within the safe and comfortable confines of the Pine Tree State.

My explorative journey has truly been an attempt to comprehend the sheer scale of our world, a tough lesson to learn growing up on an island (population 350) in Penobscot Bay. Travel and far-flung living have been my map for understanding the vast distances between people and places, our own boundaries existing both geographically and psychologically.

More than that, though, my experiences have been about self-effacing moments of introspection, those points of realization in life when the dizzying complexity and intimidating size of our world come into sharp focus. These moments, when I’m far away from Maine, are ironically both the times when I miss the place most and when I feel most driven to keep exploring beyond the state’s borders. It is the intrigue of being far from home, but feeling completely at home, that propels me forward.

Having lived outside Maine for five years now, I see a flip side to the dilemma posed by the brain drain. Without the experience gained from leaving Maine, my generation and those who follow may lack a necessary perspective and be ill-prepared to lead our continually evolving state. Our real focus should be on reining in those who want to return to Maine but can’t find jobs or affordable housing, not on dissuading curious young people from leaving the state and exploring in the first place.

To be sure, many teens don’t get the chance to see the amazing diversity of places and ideas our world offers, and most probably don’t even consider leaving the state for college. But they need to know that there is a life for them outside their small Maine communities and that the experience gained by leaving Maine, if only for a short while, can have a profound impact both on one’s life and one’s home community and state.

Sebastian White graduated last year from Alfred University in New York and works as a research analyst for a marketing firm and as a free-lance writer in Boston.