When Home is not Home
“Thoughts of being on the road might conjure feelings of loneliness. But we might need to move and keep moving, till we find a place where we feel fully safe, loved, and at home..”
When we think of home, it might conjure up feelings of safety, understanding, compassion, and belonging. But for some, all we have might be a building and a group of people that we are normally supposed to live with. So, our ‘home’ may not provide us with the nurturance or security we need.
We are not correctly loved, although, we might spend every night in bed here. This is where we have devoted so much of our time and emotional energy, but we cannot find a reasonable connection.
Maybe we’re in a relationship and we can't trust our partner to listen to certain ideas that matter deeply to us. Or our views from 5 years ago might have changed from those of our college buddies. Or maybe the family that we were born into just can't respect who we've grown into.
But even imperfect homes can feel better than being homeless, which is why we often stay around longer than we should. We fear that there might be no one or nothing out there for us, but we know we have to step outside if we wish to find certain types of emotional nourishment.
It should be no cause for alarm if we don't fit into the homes we find ourselves in since we never consciously chose them or might have been too young to understand ourselves and others when we did. Now, we have to face the challenge of making a home, more consciously: to choose the values that are important to us in our home and to choose the people we want to invite into them.
We need to build up the courage to be “Voluntarily Homeless,” as Alain De Botton describes it. This way we would be on the road not because we have nowhere else to go or no one to be with, but because we didn't feel at home in the places and with the available people.
Thoughts of being on the road might conjure feelings of loneliness. But we might need to move and keep moving, till we find a place where we feel fully safe, loved, and at home.
You have the best way of saying these things
Herbert Macaulay way is always chaos, because now why is all traffic facing one direction?