Lesson 2:1, Part II. What is Home?

Hello everyone! I’ve spent the evening reading through your stories about home and they are lovely, each and every one of them. The more I read, the more I came to realize how heterogeneous peoples’ concepts of home are, and essentially, how hard a construct it is to rigidly define.

Some of my peers spoke of having found home, perhaps a place from their childhood, or a new world where they have started a new life, while others have yet to find it, maybe even doubting if they ever will. Some tie home to a physical place, others to loved ones and others still describe it as intangible and changing.

Lara’s post really resonated with me, as she too describes home as in the mind, rather than in the heart. She links home to memory, drawing on its nostalgia. She acknowledges that home is not perfect nor without its fault, instead it is the memories we hold, both good and bad, that travel with us wherever we go. Her post made me feel like perhaps home is something in which we leave a little bit behind with the people we cross paths with (our loved ones) and a little bit stays with us forever. It is a comforting notion to think that home is both a part of us and those we love.

Milica too speaks of the imperfect nature of home. She opens up about coming to terms with her Serbian/Croatian identity and embracing that “there is an underbelly to everything, and I have to acknowledge it if I want to lay any claim to it, because I need to claim it as a whole, faults and all.” She says that for her, home is constantly changing. Her post helped me to understand that home is as complex as our own identities. Perhaps we have to accept that home will never be perfect or idealized, maybe home is something we can nurture until it resembles something of what we’d like it to be, but even then, it is not stagnant and we cannot totally contain it.

Hannia offers yet another perspective about the meaning of home. She has had many “homes,” both in Columbia and in Canada, but has yet to find a place that she can truly feel at home, a place where she can find comfort and belonging and “feel like [she’s] arrived.” She worries that she will never find such as place and I believe this may be a commonly held and relatable fear by many people, especially for those at an unstable or tenuous period in their lives.

I have learned a lot from reading these three stories, as well as many of the others on the class blog. They have challenged my own ideas of what home is and opened my mind to new perspectives about what it can be. I think that maybe we get so used to the way the ideal home is portrayed in society that it has a tendency to make us feel dissatisfied with what we have.  Yet, this assignment helps us to realize that there is not just one definition of home, but many and we are in control of what that definition is for us. Maybe we need to change our perspective of what home is for us, in order to find a sense of satisfaction in our own lives? Food for thought.

Works Cited

Curi, Hannia. “Lesson 2:1 Home.” Goodbye England. UBC Blogs, 11 June 2014. Web. 16 June 2014.

Deglan, Lara. “Assignment 2.1: My Sense of Home.” Canadian Literature. UBC Blogs, 12 June 2014. Web. 16 June 2014.

Komad, Milica. “2:1 Home is where you know how to use the shower dials, or, on a more educated note, ideas of home and value based on identity.” True North Strong and Free. UBC Blogs, 11 June 2014. Web. 16 June 2014.