Extracted from home and brought to a foreign environment, one must become accustomed to living alone. No one is exempt from the feeling of loneliness, emptiness, and sadness. No one in school prepares you for living alone. Your parents don’t teach you to cook your own dishes, rather they taught you with love and took care of you until they couldn’t anymore. The loneliness that stems in a person isn’t the fact that the environment is new or that you’re growing older. It’s more of the foundation that you are no longer with the people you lived with. You are moving on to become your own character and later that novel environment and growing up will catch up to you as the manifestation of loneliness.
Home was a sweet feeling. A safe space. Coming home after a hot, long day was the perfect finish. Smelling mother’s cooking and knowing that I have the privilege to water access, a roof under my head, and parents that love me was therapeutic to say the least. I think everyone had a place or a feeling they could call home.
For me, home was knowing that every day would be dry and hot. Should you live in southern California like me, you'll understand the weather is searing enough to fry eggs on the sidewalk. But more importantly, where I lived was a diversity of Asian food, all of which I loved eating with my friends. It was easy to drive a car onto the highway and roll into your friend's driveway. Similarly, I could take my parents out to eat and enjoy a hearty dinner. To me, that is home.
The thing about life, and the thing about home, is that you always have to adapt and continue living. You can’t stay attached to one perspective, or you won’t be able to fully enjoy the present. Home is endlessly changing. Thinking home is immutable can prevent you from relishing in your new environment. It doesn’t mean that you must attach an emotion to a place, but to really feel the atmosphere without recalling a previous location in which you settled.
Relieving yourself of holding on to the past, the present and future will become your new home. A rush of aspiration from living alone and being independent gets its gratitude from being raised by your loved ones. The loneliness will slowly fade, and content will take its place.
