Home isn’t the place that you lay your head down every night, or where your family is. Home is where you are able to feel completely comfortable. Growing up I didn’t understand the concept of home. My parents fought all the time, my dad drank and my mother just tolerated it. There aren’t many memories of when I was younger that we truly felt like a family in a home. After my parents became divorced, we were all learning to cope, and were moving from place to place, never finding that one place that I could feel truly fit in. When you keep changing schools it is hard to settle into who you are supposed to be. I have lived in eleven different houses, and not one has really felt like a home. Once my parents remarried, they seemed more at peace with their choices, yet I still couldn’t find a place that I felt at “home” in. As I grow older I find the idea of having a traditional home, with all the fancy, sleek and modern items make me uncomfortable and feel like I don’t belong.

This is where I started to figure out where I truly belong. It wasn’t until I was really able to explore the wilderness and camping on my own that I was truly able to start finding myself. I have never felt more at home than when I have a beach to sit on, a body of water nearby and the wilderness surrounding me. During these moments, there is nothing that you need to focus on besides the scenery around you. There is no technology to distract you from what is going on and ruin the moment. These places are becoming harder to find, and the places that I usually end up visiting are getting busier and more populated with new people finding the area and wanting to experience it for themselves. With the addition of more people, the peace and quiet is reduced.

Don’t get me wrong – sitting down at the water and looking out at the lake with the moonlight being the brightest thing around, and suddenly a fish jumps or something rustles in the bushes – it can definitely scare you. But that moment of peace, where there is nothing happening but the stillness around you, is where I feel at home. There is nothing to judge the choices that I have made in life, there is no second guessing the decisions that need to be made, there is no worrying about the family that I come from. There is nothing but stillness. Even though sometimes the silence can be overbearing when your mind won’t shut up, it is nice to have a moment to take the time and sort these thoughts out.

Where you feel at “home” is different for everyone; they have different ideals of what they are looking for in their sense of home. Some people want to be surrounded by their love ones, either family or friends that are close to family, some people want to be completely alone and isolated, and some people want to be in the center of everything. Everyone has their own sense of how they feel when they are “home”. Personally, it is a complete sense of nothing, nothing but the scenery around me to capture my complete attention. I am a visual person; I love drawing, pictures and things that could take my breath away. This is where I feel at home.

Thanks for reading my blog!

Kathryn