I’ve always had a hard time answering the question, “Where are you from?” Facebook’s definition of hometown is the city where you were born. For me, that’s Vandenberg Air Force Base, California. But the only memories I have from California are fabricated ones from old home videos. We left when I was about three years old.

My parents were both engineers in the U.S. Air Force, so until we moved to Alabama when I was eleven, we were stationed to a new city every three years. Even though we’ve now pretty settled in Madison, Alabama, it took a long time for me to think of the city as a place to call home.

My standard response to, “Where are you from?” used to be, “Well, I’m most recently from Alabama, but my parents are both military, so we’ve moved around a lot.” This is the most comprehensive answer, but as time passed and I’d lived in Alabama longer, I began to think that it no longer needed a caveat.

To be honest, I qualified my status as an Alabamian because of the misconceptions (and accurate conceptions) people have about our state. It was a kind of, “I’m from Alabama, but I’m not like those people.” I still do it to a certain degree. The Huntsville/Madison area is a cool little bubble, and I sometimes use that fact to distance myself from Alabama as a whole.

I need to stop. Doing stuff like that is just reinforcing the idea that everyone from Alabama (except me!) is a redneck without shoes or electricity. My randomly assigned roommate freshman year asked me if we had frozen yogurt in Alabama. Alabama has a bunch of cool cities with educated, cultured, awesome people. I shouldn’t detract from that by saying that I’m from Alabama, “but…”

I wasn’t born and raised in Alabama, but I went through part of middle school and all of high school there. I didn’t do all of my growing up there, but I did grow up there. I met my best friends there. I worked my first jobs there. I learned how to drive there. I lived there for more than three years, which is a trophy Alabama will soon have to share with Missouri. The people I met and the experiences I had in Alabama shaped me as a person. And it’s about time the Yellowhammer State got some credit for that.

I was recently inspired to make a map that highlighted all the different states I’ve lived in. The process took a lot longer than I had originally anticipated, but I’m very happy with the final product. I put hearts over the cities where I’ve lived, with a little yellow one over Madison, Alabama.

I love that my childhood was spent in these different parts of the country, and I’m excited to continue exploring in my adult life. But this map thing took many hours. I don’t think I’ll make a new one for that.