I grew up in a suburb of Delta. The streets were small, and often winding, but it was easy to get from A to B using whatever method that you liked. I really liked bike riding around, and I eventually developed my skills at biking in this area by riding into neighbouring towns to pass the time. I had done this so often that to this day, even as the town has changed quite drastically from buildings being torn down to intersections being rebuilt, my mental map of Ladner is pristine.
Since leaving high school and beginning work in various fields I have moved to Vancouver, and the feeling of home has become different. I have a place that I live with my partner whom I love, and we’ve got lovely cats and a community of friends around us. But it doesn’t feel like ‘home’ the way that ‘home’ feels.
Really, I have two different sets of home: one that feels like adventure, and curiosity, and the slow-pace of a suburb; and another that feels like security, and rest, and perhaps a little cramped. They both feel like love. They both feel like safety.
Since I’ve been working I’ve been taking transit, bike riding, and walking most of the time to get from one place to another. This means that since working in a more professional field, and getting older, I’ve had to start reacquainting myself with driving. Vancouver is not a very safe place to do this, as the rush of the city makes people a lot less patient than would be helpful to a driver trying to gain confidence, so my partner and I have been taking trips down to Ladner on the weekends to do just this. Before this, the last time I was driving in Ladner I was still in high school, and since getting back onto the road, I’ve been going over the same routes and practicing the same intersections, turns, and lane-changes that 16 year old me was practicing.
Returning to my home town to do this creates a strange clashing of worlds inside my head. The home of my childhood really does feel like childhood. It feels like exploration, and like wandering without pressure. And this is exactly what I am able to do when I explore my home town on these weekend trips. My partner and I wander aimlessly in the car through streets that I know so well. Not having not grown up in the area, my partner had always assumed that I was directionally challenged, as I don’t have a good sense of how to get around by car in Vancouver — I can bike and I can train but providing driving directions, not so much. But driving around in Ladner is a totally different story. I’m planning my routes several streets ahead, I’m able to visualize and explain what each of these turns is going to look like before we get there, and I’m completely at ease with the idea of where we are going to go.
Over the past year, ‘home’ has become a much stranger word to many people. During the lockdown in March and April all the schools in BC closed while the government started to plan its next steps to combat Coronavirus. That time, was the period that so many of us are now familiar with: Work-From-Home! Since becoming an adult and living with my partner, my concept of home centred around my living space. ‘Home’ was one place, ‘work’ was someplace else. But under work-from-home, the two places melded into one. Where I once had the security of knowing I could simply close my eyes to the world outside, strangely, the world outside was seeping in. I had to manage the space in my home so that work happened in a certain area, and home happened everywhere else. One of the hardest psychological affects of coronavirus during this period (other than the lack of certainty, the unclear yet overwhelming presence of danger, the changing expectations of what a functioning society was going to look like, and the knowledge that things were going to get worse before they got better) was the compartmentalization of everyday life.
After schools started opening again, and the simply terrifying aspect of returning to work became a reality, my home started to become home again. I had a safe space returned to me. I knew there was a place that I could come to and relax, even when the school — which in the back of my mind was a death trap — felt overbearing. The areas of my apartment that were designated to work, were no longer simply ‘work’ spaces. They were home spaces that I could do work in. More of my home was returning to me.
To me, home is a complicated idea, and I think it probably is for many people. I have ideas of home that have to do with where I grew up; an idea that has more to do with how the place feels in my mind and in my gut. There is the physical space that is so familiar to me, it is as if it is tattooed on my brain. But there is also the ‘home’ that is a physical space that has changed several times in the past year alone. There is a place called ‘home’ in my mind that feels like it is back in time to when I was a kid, just figuring out who I was and what I could do; and another that is grounded in the present and sometimes painfully anticipating the future. And I have ideas of home that have to do with where I most want to be at the end of the day, where I know I feel safe and secure, and where I know I can take a breath and close my mind to the world. And I know so far this one has stayed with me, as when that went away, for a while it felt like home was disappearing, too.
I know not everyone has these same feelings of ‘home’ that we attribute to the places that we live. I know that some people have simpler ideas of home, and other people have much more complicated ideas. Not everyone had a safe childhood like me, or moved to a new city like me. And not everyone was impacted by this past year the same way that I was. But to me, home is a mixture of a lot of ideas and emotions and events that are difficult to attach to one location, because, strangely, they go wherever I go. Home is always changing because where we are always changes, who we are always changes, the world around us always changes, and how we feel never stops changing.
Beck, Julie. “The Psychology of Home: Why Where You Live Matters So Much.” The Atlantic, https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2011/12/the-psychology-of-home-why-where-you-live-means-so-much/249800/. Accessed 9 Feb. 2021.
Aziz, Saba. “‘Loneliness Pandemic’: Work from home during COVID-19 takes mental toll on Canadians.” Global News, https://globalnews.ca/news/7589114/coronavirus-mental-health-work-from-home-covid-19/. Accessed 9 Feb. 2021