Find Your Own Way Home

I’ve read Postsecret for years and years. It’s always been a really interesting and full of secrets that didn’t really apply to me. There has always just been something oddly captivating about seeing the things that people felt they could only share anonymously. Not with the friends or family. Not even some stranger on the street. But instead, literally billions of people can see their innermost truths laid bare.

As I mentioned, the secrets on the website had never really pertained to me directly until I saw this one.

This was something I had actually thought about and felt a lot lately. What feels like a long time ago, I thought I knew what home meant. I could have defined it for you and I you might have even agreed. Growing up, home was a place which for me was a house in Hampstead, NH. That would be my definition of home from age 3 until about 26 when I moved into the condo. I thought the condo was going to be my home but it never really was and it was something I struggled to get my head around. It was definitely the place I lived. The house in Hampstead was gone. How was this not home? It just wasn’t.

It took me until fairly recently to really get it. Home is not a place. Hampstead had been my home because it was where my family was and it was a place that had been the location of most of my memories for most of my life. The building was only home by association with the other bigger and more important things that life is built around. When I left Albany and moved back to New Hampshire I thought I was coming home and it was going to have all the positive feelings and memories to go along with it. It didn’t really work that way though.

In theory, I should have been able to come to this place and make it my home by building new memories with my family. Well, my family had changed since I had gotten older. When you’re little, your family is your direct relatives. The people who help build the first part of your life. Once you “grow up” and head off on your own you have to build your own family. I had the person I wanted to be my family and when I got this place it was against her will. That alone made it so this would never be our home and made it impossible for us to ever properly be a family. The right kind of memories can never be built if one of the people doesn’t want it to be their home. Instead of getting to build happy memories you end up with frustration and animosity.You’re essentially forcing someone to do something when they don’t want to. Who does that to their family? It cracks the foundation and breaks everything down. This place can never be my home.

Home isn’t a place, no matter how much you want it to be. It’s those bigger things and since the day the one I wanted to be my family left, this place has felt cold and empty to me.

As it turns out, I do know what home is now. I just don’t have it. All I know is, I really want my family back and she basically doesn’t want anything to do with me. That is a way worse feeling than not knowing where home is.