Moving. As adults, that word tends to make us a little crazy and very exhausted. It has the power to send us into a tailspin. We immediately start to think about hiring movers and if we even need to hire movers and about what dishware belongs to who.

Moving. As kids, that word is incredibly complicated and, oftentimes, horrifying. I had friends growing up who moved from the town over or moved from another state for one of their parent’s jobs. As an adult, I have friends who have moved from across the country or have moved from countries on the other side of the world. I have moved thirteen times, ten of those times being in Monroe County, Rochester, alone. I never hated moving, I always walked into each new place and imagined what this part of my life would be like. My imagination ran wild, it’s what saved me.

I remember the house I grew up in. I remember the double bed I made my parents buy me when I grew tired of my single. I remember when my dad put the arborvitaes in the backyard and when we got hardwood floors installed. I remember when my parents would buy live lobsters and they’d crawl around the kitchen floor while we laid on our stomachs and watched them. Once, my grandpa gave my sister and I a bag of his old ties, and we created a maze between our bedrooms. I remember.

I don’t remember the house we lived in when my parents got divorced. My mom tells me we lived there for a year. I can remember the large barn in the side yard and the creek that ran behind the woods in our backyard. But I can’t remember the inside of the house, I can’t remember my room or the layout of the kitchen, or if the stairs had a banister or a railing. It’s the house we lived in when we were in a bad car accident, it’s where we lived when my parents’ marriage fell apart. But I can’t remember. I think our brains do this for us as a way to protect us. It blocks out things that have the potential to ruin bits of ourselves.

There are negatives to moving, that’s a given. The negatives of the actual move oftentimes coincide with negative feelings of the place you’re leaving. Maybe it’s the house with the porch where your first love broke up with you or maybe it’s the house where your parents seemed to crumble. But moving everything you own in moving trucks or in multiple sedans owned by your relatives isn’t all negative, when one does it so many times, it becomes a pattern. Patterns exist throughout and within our lives, and moving has seemed to become a pattern of my life.

Moving so many times has given me a sense of consistency in inconsistency. I quickly became a professional at packing a box, but I always held back when it came to the unpacking. I kept boxes of books in my closet next to my sneakers because I figured taking them out and placing them on a shelf would be time better spent doing something else. I still have extra sets of keys laying around that belong to homes that no longer belong to me. The homes that used to belong to me, to rooms that belonged to me, the windows and the doors. They were mine, but then we moved and then they weren’t. This is how I started to un-learn the idea of a home being a building with four walls.

Home, to me, is people. Home, to me, is a place. That place is not a building, it’s being in an environment with the people I care about, with the people I adore. Give me a rooftop in the city in the middle of the night where I can see the stars, and I’m home. Give me a Friday night with good friends, and that’s home for me. A lot of people invest in their houses, wanting to make them as homey and as warm as possible. I invest in people, I invest in the relationships in my life because they are my houses. I grew up in numerous houses, I was taught to take good care of what belonged to us. Now I like to collect people like my childhood collected houses.

I no longer carry around the concept of a home being a building or a place. If I chose to, I could put all of my possessions in my car and drive off to another town or another state. I’m not scared of moving, I don’t hate moving. Moving has taught me how to be comfortable.