The Unshakable Pull of Home

Whatever it is, wherever it is, we're all born to chase it.

Here I am. Purple pen in hand, feet sandy, ears and neck sun-warmed, I am watching boats shimmer on the Martha’s Vineyard coastline from across the waves of Cape Cod.

It is a new life. A new old life. I am home.

This is the the ocean I begged my parents to let me stay in for just ten more minutes. These are the gray cedar shingles I loved as a child, the heat that I played and sweated and grew tired in. These are the people, this is the sand.

I have no idea what life has in store these days, but I know I belong here. Even if I woke up this morning at 4am, tossing and turning over the anxiety of unemployment. Even if I’m totally unsure of what I want to do. This belonging is deeper than all of that - it’s in my bones.

I think that needing to leave the place that raised you is both natural and healthy. For me, it was a heavy need - masquerading as a light one, but steeped in trauma, dead-ends, dead friends, conflict, and a feeling of being wholly internally unmoored. Running away to the mystical land of the West Coast for half a decade taught me to build myself, take myself apart, and rebuild again from scrap. It taught me to break my own heart in the service of a better life, to search unrelentingly for my people, and to humble myself enough to learn something from everyone around me.

But there’s something to be said for a place where belonging is as easy as breathing. Maybe, for you, it’s the place I just left…and that’s wonderful. For me, it wasn’t, although it took a long time for that conclusion to develop. I don’t think the part of the world you grew up in is always the part of the world you find belonging in. Of course not. That would be too easy, right? I mean, I had to spend years on the opposite side of the continent to realize this was the home I wanted. I wouldn’t have wanted it if I hadn’t left it behind.

I don’t think this process is easy or intuitive for a lot of us, and honestly, I don’t think it should be. But I will always believe that the pursuit of home is a noble pursuit.

Maybe you, like me, anchor your soul to places. Maybe you’re more like my partner, who ascribes much less importance to physical locations and instead thinks of home as a person, a pet, a friend group, or a set of your favorite creature comforts. Maybe Odysseus stared into the faces of death and madness time after time because he needed his wife and son close in order to rest. Maybe he did it because the winds and sands of Ithaca were in his every breath. Maybe some divine scramble of both.

Whatever it is for you, I hope you find it. I hope we all do.