I genuinely appreciate and want mirror your comments here.
A bit older than you, I grew up in a very small town that got gobbled up by Houston sprawl.
I fled that after high-school, as did all my much-higher SAT-score friends.
I went from urban city to urban city, until I realized that what I wanted wasn’t “having fun and finding a lover”, it was finding a place to become myself.
The place I found has now become a Mecca for young people who are following my same path.
Just want to offer that everything is changing, and America is still the place to go, lay low, and make a family.