Every holiday, I am asked the same question by my friends: “When are you going home for break?” My answer is the same as always: “I’m not.” My friends usually respond with confusion, demanding to know why. My answer is simple: I hate going home. They usually respond with something along the lines of “Don’t you want to go home and relax with your family?” I almost want to laugh when they say this – actually, I do laugh.
You see, “home” for me isn’t the picture-perfect, relaxing, nurturing environment that it is to a lot of other people. Home to me is sitting in my room, with my headphones on, trying to drown out the sounds of family arguing and yelling. Home is the confines of the room I share with my sister, old, dusty and overcrowded. Home is the sound of doors being slammed shut and the tense atmosphere that follows. Home is where I lock my door sometimes because I’m scared of someone barging in and yelling at me. Home is where I don’t feel safe inside my own head.
Above all, home is my lack of independence. When I’m under my parent’s roof, I follow their rules -- never mind that I’m a legal adult. Even if I’m visiting for the weekend, I still need to ask for permission before I go out to hang out with my friends. I can’t even go anywhere on my own. And I absolutely hate that. I have nowhere to go, no one to hang out with and nothing to do. As a person with depression and anxiety, this does not make for a good combo. When I’m home, I can’t escape. Home is not a healthy environment for me. Home is my lack of a mental and emotional safe space.
Before you say it, no, I’m not heartless and neither is my family. I love seeing my family and I love seeing how happy it makes them when I finally come to visit. They love me, they care about me, they show me affection and they miss me when I’m gone. I’m very fortunate and grateful to call them my family.
But my happiness is always short-lived. The good does not cancel out all the bad, problematic aspects that come with the living environment of my so-called “home.” Within a few hours, I am miserable again and I fall into the deep recesses of my depression and my anxiety. I feel trapped in my thoughts with nothing but frighteningly loud verbal arguments as my background music.
The truth is, I hate going home because it’s not good for me. Going home is a stressful experience for me, a time period filled with lots of anxiety and depression. That’s not healthy. Every time I come home, I count down the time till I leave. And that’s exactly why I stopped going home as frequently as I used to. Not going home taught me the true value of my independence. It taught me how to value my personal mental health above all. It taught me how to take care of myself, even if other people didn’t understand it. I learned that I’m capable of being a normal, functional person when I have my independence. It taught me that it’s OK to put myself first, that I don’t have to subject myself to an emotional roller-coaster out of guilt for not seeing my family.
I greatly value my freedom and I don’t have to subject myself to losing it just for the sake of going home. More than anything, I learned that it’s OK if you don’t like going home; it doesn’t make you a bad person, it just makes you a person who values their own health and happiness.
