Lesson 2.1- Home?

What is home? That is such a difficult question. I used to partially define home as the space where I am physically living at. It’s where my parents and siblings live. It’s where I am able to rest my head on a pillow and drift asleep without laying wide awake during the wee hours of night. Naturally, home isn’t exclusively an address on one’s driver license. For me, home was also a feeling of familiarity and comfort. It was a feeling of where everything felt “right”. You could say that home was my secure base. Now you might be wondering… what’s with all the past tenses? Over the last year, my definition of home has changed significantly. Part of it was due to events in my personal life, and the other half of it was due to a story I will now tell you.

Last December, I moved from my previous home of 15 years into a new house and neighbourhood. I had a lot resentment over my parent’s decision decision for a number of reasons. They “forgot” to tell me that we would be moving, which was rather upsetting. As you may also imagine, moving during finals exam was a complete nightmare. As well, my sense of familiarity also disappeared. I loved the neighbourhood that I lived in. It was where I went to elementary and high school, where most of my friends lived… It’s funny, because whenever I return to my old neighbourhood and see my old house, it still feels much like what home used to mean to me. You might now be thinking… damn, this girl is overly attached to her old house! Well, maybe you’re right, sometimes I become more attached to things than I realize.

As part of the decision to move, my parents also rented out part of the lower suite of the new house. To my dismay, this played out to be 6 months of hell. The tenants was a family that consisted of a mother, her 1 and 3 year old kids, and her mother-in-law. Both adults had absolutely no control over the children. They would cause a great deal of noise all day long- daytime, late nights, early mornings, you name it. Instrument playing, 1am games of tag, and house-shaking wall banging was routine. Unfortunately for me, my room was also on the lower suite while the rest of my family had rooms upstairs. Such problems escalated rapidly, which made me scared of being in my own house. The only time I would spend time in my room is when I would sleep. It was impossible to do anything else in there. I’ve woken up on multiple occasions to study at 5am in attempts to have some quiet study time. Well, that didn’t work out either. Neither the tenants nor my parents would or could do much about my pleas for some quiet time.

Every night, I would lie on my bed wondering why this was happening to me. I felt like nobody understood me. Sometimes my sister would say “Jenny, you’re just overreacting. Get over it.” It’s a scary feeling when one is robbed of familiarity and comfort, especially in their own living space. I felt absolutely cheated. I knew that I shouldn’t be petrified of my house, but I was. I wanted to move back to the old house, even if that meant sharing a room and closet with my sister. Having my own room and bathroom is of no significance to me if I was deprived of emotional comfort. In attempt to salvage what was left of my sanity, I took matters into my own hands. I avoided the house like the plague. Once, I even pulled out the sofa bed and slept upstairs. It wasn’t until late May that the tenants were finally evicted.

I’ve thought long and hard about what home means to me now, but I can’t put a label on it. And quite frankly, I’m currently not interested in pinpointing what it exactly means to me. I’m in the process of regaining the trust that was broken: the belief that my house is a place where I can be in. However, the thing that comes closest to capturing my ideals and aspirations of home are through previous experiences of home in photographs. I am incredibly lucky that my parents snapped lots of photos when I was growing up, as I’m able to look back on them. In a TED Talk by Daniel Kahneman, he spoke about how the memory of an experience can be ruined, but not necessarily the experience itself. Although my feelings of home have been destroyed, past experiences of them that were captured in photographs remain static. It’s nice to be able to look back and to know that nothing can take away from the photos. This is something I hold on to because physical space continually changes. What is familiar, comfortable, and feels right evolves, matures, and becomes broken over time. As a reminder to myself, I’ve decorated my room in a way that displays a small portion of them. My hope is that I will one day regain the sentiments of what home had meant to me.

Works Cited

Kahneman, Daniel. “The Riddle of Experience vs. Memory.” Video. Ted.com. TED Talks, 2010. Online. 9 June 2014.