There’s a little voice in your soul calling out, “This is all wrong! Please take me home!”

Only you aren’t quite sure where home is.

For some time now, you have suspected that home is not a place, but a feeling.

If folks are lucky, they find it in structures where they actually live, with people who legally and biologically call themselves family.

But that, dear homeless child, has never been your lot.

And that’s okay.

The moment you acknowledged your birth nest was not really home, you freed yourself to go and build the space that was. 

Your ache has unbound you!

Your life pulses with the very essence of liberty.

The world calls you Drifter. But “drifting” implies you lack concern for your path, as well as control of it, and neither of these things are true.

You are far from aimless and you are the very opposite of unmotivated.

You have a hunger in your heart which is incredibly specific in its aims.

Yes: You wander. But all of your wanderings are set to your sacred task of finding home.

The world calls you Commitment-phobe. This is preposterous! You’ve never feared commitment.

In truth, you are quite anxious to find it.

You fear only tethering yourself to people and places who are not home and who, moreover, will keep you from finding it.

You are terrified of those who would try to possess you, forcing false roots to spring from your heels: stay here. Do this thing which is not you, but would please us.

The world calls you Betrayer.  This is because you have mastered the critical art of walking away.

You have embraced accountability for your life. You seek full ownership of your destiny.

You do not love lightly, and it breaks your heart to leave one whom you care about. But you will do it, if it is necessary.

You will do it, if the situation has grown poisonous.

You will do it, if staying will keep you from growing into your better self.

You will walk away, if you must, with nothing but your clothes and your courage, and take comfort in the idea that your true home is still out there, waiting for you. Your feet will return easily to the road, seeking that bliss.

When friends suffer in toxic relationships, binding themselves to unhealthy shelters, you weep for them. You cannot imagine why they subject themselves to such misery. Your advice is always to leave; perhaps, to wander with you for a while. But they will never come along, because they believe themselves home.

But you know: this is not home.

The world calls you Dangerous. This is because you walk hard paths and are often alone.

You have taken the unusual route of going out to go home.

Your quest has compelled you to abandon shelter, to expose yourself to the risks of storms.

And that is dangerous.

There are times when you have been driven into an unseemly cave, for the sake of staving off the teeth of winter. This is also dangerous, and you know it.

You were scared in those caves, as scared as you had been outside them, and sometimes more so. And sometimes you stayed a bit longer in that darkness than you should have.

But your inner compass has always been strong, and your vision keen. You are no fool.

You have always known that these terrible caves are but temporary stopping points.

Because even though you may not know where your home is, but you are very certain that when you are there, you are never scared.

What is home?

You are certain home is not a building, but something more. A big element in your journey homeward is learning to define the place you are seeking.

Is it a land feature? An ancestral connection?

Perhaps it is an environment which allows a talent to shine.

Perhaps it a community with shared values: a sisterhood, a brotherhood, a tribe.

Perhaps your home carries an accent of romance, and is defined by a particular relationship dynamic.

Perhaps your home is entirely within you, and has been, all along.

Perhaps you cannot yet articulate what sort of home you would like, and are only certain that it must be something else than what you now have.

Your homelessness is written by little secrets deep inside you: the remnants of dreams and old hopes and first-star wishes you believed you had buried, but which still exist and very much want a space to speak.

Perhaps home is where you have the space to hear them.

The truth is that you are not really homeless. What you are is homesick.

Your heart knows where it belongs. The journey home is about remembering it.

Author: Katie-Anne Laulumets 

Editor: Renée Picard

Photo: David Antsiss (via geograph)