“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”
T.S. Eliot, Originally published 1943
Think about home. How does that word feel for you? Warm? Cozy? Messy? Bright? Gargantuan? Fun? Dingy? Safe? It’s a trigger word for some. It’s definitely a trigger word for me. I have been looking for “home” my whole life.
I envy those who can look back on their childhood with warm and fuzzy feelings. I wish I could. As soon as I was able, I set out to find my dream home. In my ignorance and haste, I made boneheaded mistakes. It didn’t quite work out as I expected. To start, I needed to believe I was capable of achieving stability. I wasn’t there yet.
The home I so desperately wanted when I was younger had to be created by me and me alone. “Me” wasn’t ready. “Me” moved around a lot. It took ages for this penny to drop. “Wherever I go, there I am.” Years of international travel taught me that packed with your luggage is all of your other baggage. To be sure, I traveled widely for years to study, to learn, to explore, and simply for adventure.
Underneath those goals was the unexpressed hope that by being somewhere else, I might BE someone else. Someone I actually liked and admired. Someone I could love and support. Someone I wanted to spend time with. I still cringe at the memory of adopting a British accent in London one summer. My Queen’s English was passable enough to chattily converse with a traffic bobby without raising suspicion that I was not a fellow citizen. Perhaps he was just a proper English gentleman.
What I hadn’t factored in when I headed off for foreign shores was that I needed to get rid of the mess in my own foundation first. You can try to build a house on quicksand, but it is going to fail. Before a house can be built, the foundation must be prepared and made solid. When one’s childhood is emotionally unstable, it can be difficult to know what is needed to stabilize that internal foundation. In my case, I moved around a lot. Every six months or so. For years.
The reason – though I didn’t know this as clearly when I was younger – was that staying in one place for too long allowed unwelcome feelings to come up that I didn’t know how to deal with. Eventually, legions of counselors over many years helped me excavate the muck in my psychic basement. Then one day the pile of muck is outside. The rot is drying in the sunlight. It finally desiccates down to dust and the wind blows it away.
How did I know I was well on the way to healing? I could talk about difficult events in my childhood without panicking or plummeting. I had searched for years for ways to feel normal. I didn’t want to be constantly nervous, or anxious, or terrified, or overwhelmed. That state of mind finally arrived when I could see and separate feeling like a bad person from a person who had many bad things happen to her. Such is the fate of the unprotected child.
I believe I am a good person because I continued to seek answers for why I didn’t feel like one. What a ride – and a long one at that. All that external and internal traveling has seen me finally disembark at a happy place. That dream home? Sure, it would be nice. But acquiring it is much lower on my list of life priorities these days. I am the home I always craved and needed. Welcome to me.
Expressive Compulsive 