Unfamiliar.

Dear reader,

What is ‘home’?

Could it be where you live? Where you grew up? Where your family lives?

I think most of us aren’t really sure what makes our home ‘home’ but we can feel deep down what is and isn’t our ‘home’.

So ‘home’ isn’t a place, it’s a state of mind. ‘Home’ is the emotion that stems from a sense of comfort and familiarity to a certain place. So for most people home is wherever your family and close friends are because you can feel comfortable around them and you are familiar with them.

Those are the two key elements of home, comfort and the familiar.

When moving to a new place it can quickly start to feel like home if you move there with family. But if you move to a new place on your own after just reaching adulthood it can be a very long time before ‘home’ stops feeling like a place in the past and starts feeling like where you are. This is because home comes from the relationships you foster in your new place. The sense of ‘home never really comes back until you start a family of your own.

The young adult sets out into the world, waving their parents goodbye. But they have a part of them missing. A wound in their heart that doesn’t affect their everyday life but still just feels wrong and needs to heal for the young adult to feel ‘right’ again. If the young adult visits again their parents and where they grew up then the wound in their heart can stop hurting for a while, but it doesn’t heal. Many years pass and the young adult finds love, marries, has children, buys a home somewhere in the suburbs, starts a routine of going to work on weekdays and sleeping in with their spouse and bonding with the kids on weekends. The wound in the adult’s heart been there so long that they’d forgotten how it had felt before. But one day they realise that the wound has healed. They feel content with their life and family. Soon however, the kids move out and some time after that the heart starts slowing down.

Or instead you could just never leave the hometown where you grew up and never lose the sense of home. But making your own way is an important part of life. It’s a necessary pain to lose home for a while.

Because not all those who wander are truly lost.

Kind regards,

Skyler James Xanderson