The Story of Home
As someone who has spent the majority of recent years away from my hometown in California and resided in multiple places where I felt like my personality and way of being was less welcomed, my sense of California being home has really grown. To me, home is a place where I feel loved and appreciated. At home, I am surrounded by people I love, who accept and understand me; it is, most of all, a place where I can be myself comfortably. I feel safer, freer, and empowered when I am there.
My sense of home revolves around 2 contexts. The first is based on location: California, more specifically, the Bay Area. As soon as I step into California—from any location into the border—I feel more comfortable. When I’m there, compared to other places I’ve been, I feel relatively welcomed and accepted by the general society. As a result, I feel more comfortable being myself. Even if people are different everywhere in California and I know not all of them accept me, I attach all my feelings of being welcomed and loved to California at large. California is also a place where I believe many people will be relatively open-minded, accepting, free-thinking. Although there are also many people who aren’t like that, I have met so many amazing people in California. This ties into my 2nd perception of home, one that is non-geographical: I am at home when I am with one or more of the people closest to me. Whether this is Ben from Germany, Ruonan in Vancouver, or Donna from California, I feel at home in the moments that I am with any of them. In fact, I feel more at home being with the people I have these soul-level connections with than I would if I was just at home geographically, even if I was at the house I was born in (in the Bay Area). It just happens that most of my closest friends are concentrated in the Bay Area. I have had so many experiences and adventures with these people across California, and these people are what most emphasize my feelings of the Bay Area being home.
Growing up, I didn’t feel that close to my family because of some negative and unhealthy dynamics that oftentimes made me feel less than accepted. However, my closest friends fulfilled me on such a deep level that it wasn’t necessary to reach for that sense of home when I was at “home”. They gave me the warmth, love, acceptance, and sense of connection that I always reached for but couldn’t get at “home”. My closest friends don’t even have to be with me for me to feel at home, just being in a place where I know many of my good friends are nearby provides emotional padding from hardships I may experience.
Overall, home is a place or a moment where I feel safety, acceptance, freedom, and warmth. Home is something that quite frequently makes me feel fulfilled. Generally, this is with people I love and appreciate and who love and appreciate me. I feel most at home when I can be myself, with friends who affirm me, friends who I can go on adventures with, have discussions, play, enjoy moments, and do the things I love with.
However, I have been exploring another mental and emotional sense of home that has been building within me recently. I think home is really created by the stories we tell ourselves about what encompasses home. My story around home surrounds happiness and fulfillment. I don’t think home has to be from external forces. Home is also created from accepting myself, being able to have fun with and appreciate myself; it can be a process, more and more throughout time. Also, I think a sense of home in everyday life can be brought by accepting anything that life might bring, rather than running away from it… This also has a lot to do with stories we tell ourselves, stories that can either teach us to avoid things that are currently unpleasant, that certain things should be thought of as unpleasant, or stories that teach us to embrace as many of the experience of life as we can rather than trying to resist them. The stories we tell ourselves can lead us to frame things a certain way, but we can tell our own stories to re-frame things… to re-frame as many things as possible to be enjoyable, worthwhile, and something to be appreciated (even the things that currently seem unpleasant). Maybe it’s difficult to do this for the very unpleasant experiences, but the more things we love and appreciate, the more enjoyable life becomes… so why not tell stories that teach us to love everything in some way, or at least view it as somehow worthwhile. In this way, the feeling of home can even be integrated into more and more of the experience of life itself.
McAndrew, Frank T. “Home Is Where the Heart Is, but Where Is ‘Home’?” Psychology Today, Sussex Publishers, 3 Aug. 2015, www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/out-the-ooze/201508/home-is-where-the-heart-is-where-is-home.
Hi Gabi!
I was instantly intrigued as you spoke about California. I have only been to LA, but what washed over me while I was there was that everyone was away from their geographical home, but felt at home nonetheless. The sprawling infrastructure and the sense that anything could be yours because it’s the centre of something great and it’s sunny seemed to allow people to give-in and actually invite it to be their new geographical home. What I also saw were so many tribes of people that one could finally find their tribe or in fact create one. Do you ever think Vancouver could be such a place?
Hi Sarah!
Yes I think Vancouver is such a place depending how much one tries to reach out, build community, or find a community of people who they love and feel comfortable with. Vancouver was particularly hard for me at times because I’m not used to the lack of eye contact or reservedness there compared to California. It was very hard for me to make friends, especially finding people who were reliable and put as much effort as me in friendships. It was also harder to break into groups and feel welcomed, than it was in California. Even though people were nice to me, for some reason, most of the time it didn’t feel genuine. I think this cultural shock made me automatically judge Vancouver and my experience there rather than giving it the chance it deserved. I built a distrust collectively in the people there because of my initial experiences which probably negatively tinted my mindset in a way that blocked me from truly thriving and finding a community there, although I eventually did. I don’t think I truly discovered Vancouver, and most of my experience was at UBC. There’s so much going on in Vancouver though that I think if one tried, it wouldn’t be hard to find a tribe or create one. Anything you want, you can get as long as you reach for it or create it yourself. Once that community is built, I think many do invite Vancouver to be their new geographical home. It may take a bit longer in Vancouver than in California though, although my experience may be different from many others. I also think, there’s so much innovation, entrepreneurship and tech in Vancouver that one can definitely feel like the centre of something great, if you are a part of that. Thanks for your question!
Gaby