Home. The word is filled with so many connotations and expectations, many contradictory. For me, the idea of home conjure up feelings of security and belonging, which march hand in hand across my internal landscape with feelings of desperation and isolation.
Looking back over my life I can see the times I’ve built a home, most notably with my former husband. We bought an adorable 1900’s era Craftsman about a mile from a developing downtown neighborhood. I loved that house, and for a while, I loved the life I lived in it. Dinner parties, two adorable cats, a husband I’d pledged my life to.
Not long after we moved in, however, the cracks around the seams began to show. They’d always been there, of course. The enormity of owning a house just made them a lot more visible.
I have a nomadic spirit. I have a troubled and deepening relationship with that spirit. For a long time, I told myself I needed a solid, stable life. Once I got that, happiness and peace would blossom. What happened, instead, was that my need for travel, newness, and adventure got wind of my plans for living in one place for the foreseeable future and started throwing fits.
At first, this manifested as a sense of diffuse heaviness. I would walk around the house, touching the walls, looking at the art we’d so lovingly hung, and wonder why I felt out of place. Then came the depression, sneaky for a while, until I found myself sobbing underneath my desk at work, frantically dialing a hotline for help.
I went to therapy after that. That morning had shown me, without a doubt, that something was seriously off. I couldn’t fix it by myself. My husband was opposed to the idea. He took the mindset that we could figure out any problem, with either of us or the relationship, together. I persisted. Unfortunately, my therapist decided the cure for all that ailed me was for me to return to school.
I stopped going after four appointments.
Eventually, my marriage ended, in large part to that pesky nomadic spirit. I crave not just new destinations, but new people, new relationships, new experiences. My former husband craves security, guarantees. It’s not wrong, I think, just different. We needed different things.
Going back further than the marriage, the house, I can look at my childhood. I never felt at home there, either. As the youngest child, sister to a pair of twins, I didn’t feel like I had a solid place in my family. I grew up in a city I never loved, never really wanted to be in. Colorado Springs was too cold, too dry, too narrow-minded, too full of big box stores and four lane streets for me to feel at home.
So, what does home mean to me, now? It’s hard to say with any certainty. As I travel, people ask me where I’m from. Outside Seattle is my default answer. If they probe further, which they sometimes do, and start on the subject of home my answer is always—given quickly—India. It is the place I felt most at peace in, most myself.
This afternoon I stopped in San Blas plaza after I ate lunch to smoke a cigarette. I sat on the wall in front of the fountain and slipped off my hiking boots. When I was in Arambol, I hardly ever wore shoes, preferring to dart around town and hop on motorcycles with my feet exposed to the earth. I felt a glimmer of this connection as I sat there, enjoying the sun as it faded behind a threatening rain cloud. When I finished my cigarette, I picked up my boots and walked to my hostel, the soles of my feet eating up the cobblestone roads. During those few minutes, I felt taller, more confident, more connected than I have since I got to Peru.
So maybe that has something to do with home, for me: it’s where I feel comfortable taking my shoes off.