Hey folks! This week’s post is a response to
‘In Search of Home’. Please give it a read if you haven’t already :)Like Helene, it seems, I too am caught in an anxious search for home.
Welcome home, I’m told as I dart about my native country, a nearly empty wish echoed at border security checkpoints and tearful reunions with those I love. I chuckle and nod and do what I can to hide the discomfort. It takes too much to explain why I feel like a foreign interloper in my homeland. I dress differently; talk differently; carry myself differently than I did ten years ago — I stand out in a space where I once belonged. Where did that person go?
I haven’t put too much thought into trying to articulate what home means to me; in the past, it’s always been a movable line, a quality that either does or does not apply to whatever place I’m in. Home was a weaponised concept growing up; I bounced from one side of my small town to another—two houses, two parents, two families, two lifestyles locked in a struggle to be my definitive safe space. Home was a trophy for one parent to lord over the other. It seemed perfectly normal in my youth, rarely sleeping in the same bed for my than three or four nights in a row before driving across town and being cast into a different space.
Perhaps that is why I felt so at home in a wonderfully cave-like flat in Edinburgh or a Mumbai apartment with a mental landlord; they were places where I could explore the possibilities of what a home could be. Leaving them behind felt like an unmaking of my identity; it seemed a core part of who I was suddenly vanished.
Being the anthropology geek I am, the myriads of ways we treat home fascinates me. If you subscribe to Goffman, it’s a backstage from the social world, a space marked by the rituals we perform within it: cooking, cleaning, sleeping and gatekeeping. We may investigate how it’s a space used to build relationships or reproduce social patterns; how it helps construct ideas of gender or family; how it transcends physical locations and becomes part of our sense of self.
But like Helene, I feel far more comfortable talking about home from a purely personal standpoint; there’s value in drawing from these grand theories, but why use this space to reduce my experiences to a data point? I’ve always had a roof over my head and a warm bed to sleep in, a space to share meals and a retreat from the world at large. I’ve never been without a backstage.
Still, she speaks of homesickness almost as a craving — a craving for what? For comfort or safety, for family? A craving for all of those anthropological goodies and strange human rituals? Is it a longing for something that no longer exists, an echo of that painful moment where familiar spaces before foreign, or when you become foreign to a familiar space?
Sitting here, writing at a desk in a house where I feel guilty for not feeling at home, I too am transfixed by that craving. Sometimes I fear I’ll always chase that high, that whatever homes I create will never be enough, that there will always be an incessant nagging, that there’s no country or city or community that will quiet the voices. Destination implies permanence and surrendered possibilities—that terrifies me. But to think of home as anything else means acknowledging that I am on the hunt for something I can’t quite define; to grow complicit in a high or to forever chase one?
In my current transience, where I occupy homes but do not have a Home, in a life spread across three continents, maybe it’s healthy to carry such cynicism. I crave what’s comes next — I always have. I’ve built homes in strange new cities, and I’ll do it again. And yet, the nagging never goes away.
What else can I do but listen to it?