Enter the work here

HOW

TO

FEEL

MORE

AT

HOME

Have you ever thought that the idea you have about what home means to you could forever change?

Home is something you ran away from or maybe home is something you had your whole life. But home will always be where your story started.

Home is not a place; it is a feeling—says Instagram post with 641 likes.

Home is where you can be yourself—at ease, ready to try out new stuff. Cook omelettes, attempt baking, burn the tip of your hair or cut all of your hair off.

At home, you can heal.

But how much of this is true?

For too many people, being happy at home is an abstract idea. For some, home represents conflict, loss, neglect, trauma.

Like ghosts who cannot escape, these experiences endure in isolation.

In the secrecy of the home, people are forced to grieve loss and deal with conflict while living in its memory.
I know it from experience. I mean, I grew up in that environment.

As Mary Douglas describes in her paper: The Idea of a Home: A Kind of Space , a home is not only a space full of domestic things, it also has some structure in time.

From set meal times to rotational access to fixed spaces such as the bathroom or the fridge: like a tyran, the home demands coordination, synchrony even. Its terms are rigid and its functioning exercises an authoritarian control over mind and body.

Remember, a home owes you nothing. Do not expect happiness, comfort, and safe shelter either. You can feel safe, comfortable, and happy in a camper, caravan, or hotel—but are these homes?

Our first home is our mother's womb. When we enter the external world our "residence" changes. But wherever we are, home always starts with our body.

As we age, our relationship with our body changes. Sometimes we look in the mirror and feel disoriented —we look for a person that no longer exists. It is no wonder we find it difficult to adjust to the environment around us.

Thoughts, perspectives, opinions, generational gaps they all find their way inside the home through the broken window creeks and sit on the wall.
People inside the home become distant. We close our doors in the hope that someone will knock and say "I am here".

Yet, a home should be that place where you can start over and over every day. But it takes some reconfiguration to feel at home again, especially after leaving the home we grew up in.

Feeling at home is the reward we experience after years of work, physical and emotional. Perhaps, you always felt at home or never questioned that feeling. Though it is a privilege few have.

What can I do to feel more at home?
—you might ask.

It is a question I have been trying hard to answer—and while I did, I relocated more times than I wanted to.

Why is it that every time I get to one place, I cannot wait to move someplace else?

I learned that feeling at home is about loving yourself and letting go. Three years of therapy gone by, and I have journeyed within as much as I did outward.

They said: Take some time alone each day and use this time to check in with your emotions.

I said: Okay—but I am still learning about how the environment around me makes me feel.

They said: Develop faith in your learning ability.

I said: How can I learn to expand my understanding of what home means to me?

They said: Think of this process like completing a puzzle. Believe that, even though you may not know all you need to feel more at home, if you simply tackle a section of the puzzle and learn from that, you will learn enough to solve the next section—and so on, until you are done.