Where is home for you? Is it where you grew up? Is it where you went to school? Is it where your family lives?
For many people, home is often a combination of these things. The word “home” is associated with an idea of permanence; it’s associated with ideas of ritual and return and family and safety. And me? I can’t quite find it.
I’m not lost. I’m not stumbling through the streets somewhere without a map and a clue. Instead, it’s that idea of permanence, the thing that is so central to the concept of “home,” that eludes me. When I use the word “home,” I’m always asked to specify: do I mean my apartment in the city, or do I mean my parents’ house? It’s not just because I’m a college student who goes to school 1,600 miles away from where her family lives. I’ve moved a grand total of eight times. I’m certain that my eighth won’t be my last. I’ve developed a bit of a restless soul because of it. And because of that, the word “home” and I are a bit at odds.
I spent the majority of my formative years on the east coast. From the time I was born until the time I was fourteen, I lived in some iteration of a small town in New Jersey. Still, within those fourteen years, my family moved three times. I left my first childhood home at three years-old and my second at ten; it was that third house that I began to most closely associate with home. I put down roots there. I met two of my best friends there. There, I planted the seeds of the hobbies that would become my passions: I started to swim, I joined a competitive dance team, I started a writing club at school, I joined Girl Scouts. Though I only spent four years there, I owe a debt to that home in particular. I grew there, and I began to love it there with a fierceness I’ve never quite felt for another place.
Of course, we were gone within the next few years.
Due to the collapsing economy of 2007, my family was on the search for economic stability. They found it down south. The family moved once again, to a suburb of Houston, Texas, the summer before my freshman year of high school.
It was a devastating change for me. Not only did I lose my friends, but I began to lose this new identity that I had made for myself; I stopped writing and I quit Girl Scouts and I stopped swimming. I started dancing again, but felt uneasy in a studio where the girls could literally dance circles around me. I started school at a new, much larger, high school, and though I was involved in the school choir, I struggled to make friends. I began to resent everything about the move: the state, its politics, the people I went to school with, my parents. And with every fight I got into with them, I insisted that this place was nor would never be “home.”
In the winter of 2010, I went to visit my grandparents in New Jersey for the holidays, and after Christmas, I insisted that they drive me to my “hometown,” to visit my best friend. I vividly remember the drive there. As we exited the freeway, and were surrounded by buildings that I used to know, I was confronted immediately with change. Had that building always been there? Or did I just not remember? An uneasy feeling spread into my stomach as I began to realize that this small, New Jersey town, I couldn’t call it my home anymore.
Flash-forward to college. I still wouldn’t call Texas home, and so I went back to the east coast, chasing that feeling of home. I enrolled in NYU, and found myself exhilarated by the community I found there. My freshman floor mates became more like family than neighbors. I rushed a sorority. I joined a dance company, who became my support system here in the city.
And yet, through it all, I found myself suddenly drawn to country music. I bought a pair of cowboy boots. I craved Mexican food and BBQ. And almost every day, I called my parents to tell them I’ve missed them.
I’ve studied abroad twice now. Both times, I’ve used the word “home” in conflicting ways, to mean where I was staying with my host family, where I was sleeping that night, where I went to school and lived for nine months out of the year, and where, when Christmas came around, to where I flew “home.”
It was only after studying abroad, after that most recent move back to NYU that it clicked for me.
I don’t believe that home is something singular, a single brick building in which you spend your entire life. After all, it was never that for me. Home can be multiple places. It is never something permanent. It is where you are loved. It is where you grew up. It is a place of familiarity and of friendship. It is where you can come inside after a long day of being the size of Godzilla and can be about the size of a Pop-tart. It is where your family is. It is where your pets are. It is your sorority, your sports team, your book club, your music group. It is where you can crawl into your bed at night, pull the covers up to your chin, and sleep because you are so relaxed. It can be one of these things, and it can be more. Home is where you feel most like yourself, and that is a luxury that can fit in so many more places than just one.
