I started writing this piece in an old journal, from when I was living at my parents’ home 4 years ago, and the crazy part is that the previous entry is titled ‘Home’ and this one is titled ‘Home?’ so I guess it’s like coming back home to myself. It also goes to show how I have gone from hating the answer I had at the moment to looking for the answer that might work for me, so cheers to growth. Right now I have many questions and perhaps some answers. But I don’t like the answers I have, hence I am looking for new ones. Two overarching questions:

WHAT DO I WANT FROM LIFE

↓

What does home feel like to me? Where do I find it? Is it a place?

I wish I had The Answer. The one, grand, comprehensive Answer I could take comfort in. The truth, not of life, but of My life. A few years ago I was married to the idea of home being a place, and the people in it. But it seems to be quite the opposite; I have been forced to accept that it may not be a place, or a person, and I may not find it outside of myself.

I have lived a few lives, sampled them, at some point realised they stopped serving me. Eventually, when these lives - a person, a job, a place - stop feeling like home, I run. A friend once said I am the avoidant boyfriend in my career. I think about that a lot. Many times this running has brought me to my parents’ home, in need of a ‘factory-reset’. And it has worked in the past, as a distraction, which I realise in retrospect.

With this ‘loss’ of home comes a loss of identity, too. If I don’t know where I belong, how do I know Who I Am. Maybe in a couple of years I will come back to this, feeling ‘at-home’ in myself and having confidence that wherever I am, for however long, with whomever around me, I feel at home. I can see how it could be liberating and incredibly comforting, but right now it’s disorienting and frightening as hell. I don’t know what the path looks like to getting there but it definitely means finding my own rhythm and making my own space in this world, instead of playing the role ‘assigned’ to me, by birth, career, marriage etc and that’s damn hard! It takes courage, faith and great balls. I’m at a place in my life where I’m running some kind of experiment on my own identity. Strip away the job, the city, the echo chamber that’s around me, and what remains? As an insufferable Type A, this is quite hard and I hate the uncertainty.