When home is no longer home

How can a small word elicit such profound sense of safety, understanding, sympathy, warmth and belonging, or the lack of, for that matter? It’s usually to home that we return to in our minds, in moments of desolation, self-doubt and fear — when our confidence ebbs and our enemies seem to close in (even if only in our minds).

To our horror, we may be forced at times to realise that despite our hopes and intense feelings of connectedness, home may not be home. Home may be a circle of people we are connected and committed to, a building we once lived in, but our particular ‘home’ may not live up to our expectations of respite, nurture, security and growth — either a childhood home or the home we built together with another.

Even though this is where we lay down our heads every night, we might feel especially misunderstood there. Even though this is where we’ve devoted much of our time and emotion, we may not find enough connection there and as much as it breaks our hearts to accept it, here we are not deeply loved, correctly understood and no longer safe.

It took me a while to understand why imperfect, dysfunctional homes can feel better than no home at all, and why people often stay around far longer than they should. It’s through listening to people’s experiences that one is able to connect the dots, stop the judgment and exercise empathy. But in the long term, it’s impossible to ignore the consistent voice inside of us, that voice that reminds us that time is short and that we are dying inside a little more each day that we stay. We have to go out there and look for the nourishment and the safety net we don’t have at home.

So many different circumstances, an adolescent and the realisation that the family he/she was born into cannot respect the person he has grown up to be ; a group of friends with an expiry date that have ceased to see the world as you do; a relationship that no longer means anything anymore; or a dangerous situation that gives no option but to flee. It shouldn’t be a surprise that so many of us don’t fit our homes, since we never consciously chose them.

Now, the challenge is to create a home where we can choose the values we want to cultivate and live by, our sanctum and the people with whom we’ll share genuine love and understanding — perhaps a foreign land that gives you nothing else, but safety. Voluntary homelessness requires not only courage, but an emotional intelligence that allows us to say: “I am on the road not because there was nowhere to go, or no one I could be with, but because those places didn’t live up to the word HOME”.

~ There are moments when one needs to keep moving until the place we live in is what home should always have been ~