Home
This must be a place?
How can we truly know what home is, if we’ve never settled once in our lives?
Is home a destination? A feeling?
Is it a state of mind? Is it a choice?
Is it the congregation of certain souls, acting out a certain activity, like sitting at the dinner table, or in front of the fireplace?
Is this something I have withheld from myself, or something that has yet to come into my view?
Where is it? What is it?
Why is it something so commonplace yet so damn hard to nail down?
How is it so tied to my identity and my happiness? How can I yearn for something that is foreign to my being?
It CAN’T be foreign to me if I yearn for it. It MUST be within me, begging to be brought closer to the surface for my senses to experience.
Perhaps it’s been there all along. Patient. Waiting. Existing despite my doubt of it. Taking up space through years of disregard.
Maybe home is a state of being, despite it all. A completely unique blueprint we each enter with, and spend a lifetime uncovering, discovering, meeting, and integrating.
Maybe it’s nothing. Just another box that we are being offered, which so many before us have happily hopped into and deemed it correct.
Maybe it’s the very thread of thinking and perceiving of self that I’m being tangential about.
Then what?
I knew when we made our plans for this summer that there would be a time where no specific place was “home.” I knew, and I glazed over it. I knew, and I told stories to myself and others about what would be happening because I needed to believe those stories to be brave enough to get here. And now, I’m facing my home wound. It’s too big to avoid, there’s nowhere else to run and hide. It’s looking me in the face and saying, “so? You ready?”
And truthfully, I don’t feel confident about it. I don’t feel “ready” like I have in the past when I’ve entered a new healing or learning chapter. It feels tender. It looks daunting. And it also feels like an incredible opportunity to be strong for my inner child, put her in her pj’s, and rub her feet until she falls asleep.
I’ve been compiling a list of all of the concepts I have found to be a framework to my spiritual practice. (I combine endless modalities, no belief system is off limits, and I highly encourage giving yourself the opportunity to explore faith and spirituality this way, no matter what your experience has been thus far). I wrote this poem today when I realized that “home” was a concept I have always yearned for and also always somehow skirted around the edges of. As a kid growing up in two homes, I was regularly trying to make my bedrooms right. I’d almost always feel like I was forgetting something. . . and I would allllways be daydreaming.
My favorite game was house. I loved to pretend to be an adult, plan and envision how I would dress, what I would do for a living. . .who I would be.
By the time I was a teenager, I was so full of angst and confusion and shame, “home” was a place I went to in my head, an updated version of those childhood daydreams. In that version though, it was a place where no one else had control, no one else had a say, no one else would decide a single thing for me again. It’s when my dreams of travelling began, and the promise to myself that I would buy my own house, as soon as I possibly could, was made. I’m chuckling as I type, because of COURSE none of that happened how the brain of past Amanda envisioned. She was attempting to create a world uninfluenced and untouched by the outside. She thought it was safer that way; she thought it was the only way. And the choices she made, when looked at through this lens, well they did indeed make sense. But they did not make a home.
If I went back to 17 year old Amanda and said I still don’t own a house, I still let outside opinions get to me from time to time, and I genuinely don’t know how many more years it will be before either of those things change, she would call me a failure. Tears formed in my eyes just now, because I am nowhere near as harsh as she was. She held me to a standard so high that it’s no wonder I had to make healing my full time priority for years.
The truth is, I wanted to believe that I could shield myself from vulnerability if I could juuust be in charge of everything. All the time.
I was in a serious partnership for 5 and a half formative years, in which we both desperately wanted to make each other home, just to feel less scared. We moved four times and had TONS of unfortunate situations with neighbors, landlords, and a cave cricket infestation (to name a few). It served its purpose. And it was not home.
After recuperating from the breakup and finishing grad school, I moved out of my moms and in with a friend, intending on letting home be fun, temporary, and light. It was a transformative and ultimately catalytic era in my life. And it was most definitely not home.
Back I went to the house on Skyline Lake, the place I so desperately just wanted to accept me and make me feel how I thought everyone felt about their childhood homes. This time, I was in the basement where my mom’s salon once was. And it was fun, and it was brief. Shortly after I moved back in was when my mom and stepdad’s plan to relocate to Florida began. And I was once again wondering, now where?
Miles and I tried to rent the house from them for a bit, and gosh was it a brutal chapter for me. I couldn’t let the house go, couldn’t recognize that I would still be me, still be good enough, still be safe, if I just said goodbye to it in my imperfect, unready state. I would never have been ready to say goodbye, truthfully. It felt agonizing and never ending, getting that house ready to sell. And after it was gone, I moved through an even harder season with my mental health. Living at Miles’ parents house had me facing fears, guilt, shame, disappointment, and shadows that scared the shit out of me.
When we moved into the house on the island, I made an agreement with myself: I would not get too invested, I would simply recognize that it would be a place that I could expand in, and honor when I could no longer continue to expand there. It was a new beginning for all of us. And wow, did I expand. I stretched and stretched and visited my edges. I made mistakes and I didn’t hide from them. I forgave myself again and again. And in the midst of it all, I was keenly aware: it wasn’t home. And this time, when it was time to go, I felt ready to leave.
I’m coming into the realization that what I have always been yearning for is acceptance from myself. Not rigidity, not control, no fanfare or title deeming me a complete adult, no trophy for having done it all. Just the space to be: fully, unapologetically, and feel welcomed. No place can offer it, nor a person. Spirituality helps a lot. It helped me find courage outside of the ego, and helped me connect with others in ways I desperately needed to. But the last part of this work is all me. And I think deep down, the plans are working out the way they are this summer because I set them up to be this way. I think subconsciously I knew that the only way I would truly submerge myself in becoming home, was to take all other options away. Until it was all I could see.
I’m writing this live and so, there’s no pretty bow tying all this together. It’s raw and unfinished. But it is how I will stay accountable. Because I deserve to feel at home right here, in my body. Wherever it sits, however it looks, in each and every season to come.
I look forward to arriving.