Home is...

 For my growing up and into young adulthood life I lived in several places. I called them Home because that is what you call the place you live. Or so I thought.

In the year 1987 I entered into living in Brattleboro VT. And a funny thing happened. I began to understand what the word Home truly meant. Even through the chemically produced fog that I lived in at that time I began to see another life was possible and that Home was not just a place, it was an Idea, and a Feeling.

So what was it about this place that I felt and thought this? Many things, some of them extremely ephemeral. And, while I could go into a list of those things, I do not believe they are important to anyone except me. We all have our own reasons for the places we call Home.

But I do know this, it was the first place that I felt like I was accepted and belonged, despite the mess that was my life. It was a place where I could breathe and be, if not ok, at least not condemned.

This quirky little artistic New England town looked at me and said Ok. You belong with us. And that is really important.

In late 1995 I found Recovery here. I do not think that I could have anywhere else. It took me a while, and another New Hampshire jail sentence, to grasp that I had to do it the way it was laid out by my predecessors, that I could not do it by my own thinking, or alone as I tried and failed to do everything else, I could only do it as a part of and not apart from.

So Home is where I feel like I belong. And in that sense I have two homes, Brattleboro VT and the rooms of Narcotics Anonymous.

In May of 2002 I moved away for a while to San Diego CA for two years and then Waynesville NC for about eight months. And while I am eternally grateful to have been to those places and to have met the people that I did, they were never Home to me. They were places that I lived.

I early 2005 I moved back to the Northeast and while I did everything that I could to land in Brattleboro again I kept ending up in Greenfield MA. And after a few months I finally accepted that Greenfield was where I was going to be for a while.

And, while Greenfield is a lovely town filled with some wonderful people it was not Home for me either. I made some friends there, I was involved there. It was just a place that I lived.

In 2014 I took a course in Personal Development called The Landmark Forum. A very intense and long three days and an evening of a fourth day. And with this comes a ten session Seminar of three hours a night once a week over several weeks.

During this Seminar the seminar leader told a story about how he had to give up an idea he had about where Home is in order to be at Home where he was. And this resonated with me a lot. Because Brattleboro was still Home and no where else could I be Home in that case.

Well, that did not work for me. I tried it. (Try being pre meditated failure 😇) And no matter how often I went through giving up Brattleboro as Home and being Home where I was I could not do it. Brattleboro stayed as Home.

So Home is where I Feel like Home is. And feelings, while not being facts and only being feelings, are still a factor into our lives. Like it or not.

In October of 2020 I finally moved back to Brattleboro. And I noticed that a tension that I had not even been aware of was no longer there. I was HOME finally.

So Home is where I can Relax. Where I can be My Self and nothing else.

In writing all of this I am finally getting to what brought this on:

"A home isn't always the house we live in. It is also the people we choose to surround ourselves with." From the book "The House in the Cerulean Sea" by TJ Klune

I read that and it resonated heavily. For many years in my growing up life and young "Adulthood" I surrounded myself with certain people all by default. I never chose anyone. I drifted thru life and things happened in my life. People showed up not by my choice, by my indifference.

Much later in life I began to make choices about who I would and would not accept into my life. And, in the beginning, I chose by habit. It was only later that I began to have some discretion and made choices based on who I am and not on who I thought would accept me.

So today, my Home is Brattleboro VT. My Home is my little Apartment that I live in by myself. My Home is my Friends and those that want to be a part of my life and show it in their actions.

I have many Homes today. And I finally can be Home wherever I choose to be Home. It only took me to just before my sixtieth birthday to figure out what that truly means in all of it's permutations, and accept these things as true, in order to get there.

Sometimes, the Journey to a place or an idea can be very long, it is still worth it though. In my opinion.