The idea of home is imbued with a profound sense of familiarity.
We only ever seek what we’ve already experienced, so our desire for belonging is because we’ve experienced it before, it’s familiar to us…even if we’ve only held it in our hand for the briefest of moments.
When life feels unfamiliar and alienation extends to meet our own reflection, we start to feel an unrelenting kind of homesickness.
For what or where we do not quite know. But we want to go home…
It’s like realizing we’ve drifted away from our moorings in the night and woken to find ourselves astray in the middle of an ocean, surrounded by horizons.
There was a time when looking in the mirror caused me more suffering and confusion than anything I’d ever known. Not because I didn’t like myself but because I didn’t know myself.
Home was suddenly not inside my own skin.
It might seem like a terrifying idea to not feel safe or welcome in your own body, but it’s just an acute version of what is otherwise a very normal experience for most of us.
When we become alienated by our own flesh, through age, illness, diagnosis, soul loss, or trauma, then everything in life becomes a substitute refuge for what we were made to offer ourselves.
