no place like home?

"home as an inward condition, a reality we don’t just create, but are constantly creating."

I’m back from five actually glorious nights in Philadelphia, the city of my birth. The trip was astonishingly good — crisp-bright December weather, incredible meals, lots of outside time exploring streets I love, a quick Amtrak jaunt down to Baltimore to see my sister, extreme lit-up Christmas gaudiness and delight everywhere I looked. The purpose of the visit was to have my kid see their cousins and keep up family traditions (another Feast of the Seven Fishes on the books!) but it turned out to be, for me, an unexpectedly peaceful and even remarkably joyful time with my parents and siblings. If you know my work at all, you know I spent years learning how to continue to know these people without sacrificing myself. What I hadn’t calculated was that one day I might feel sturdy and safe enough to enjoy them too.

I became despondent on the plane ride home, as I often am on my way back to Los Angeles, an objectively beautiful place I find inexplicably ugly, a city other people love and aspire to live in where I feel (and have felt for 14 years) fundamentally, chemically misaligned. I meant to write a breezy “there’s no place like home” post upon my return; some jokey-sappy jottings to release all this profound (confusing) longing, but when I sat down to craft the piece, everything felt off.

Is there actually no place like home? Of course not. No trope is as tidy as it sounds. I miss where I came from, sure. I miss the east coast people I know and the person I am when I’m there. I’ll most likely one day soon return. Still, every home has its purpose. While my inability to feel settled and “at home” in Los Angeles has long felt like a personal failing, without the loneliness I’ve felt in this place for all of these years, I may not have, for the first time, built a home within myself.

All of this is reminding me of an excellent LitHub essay I read a while back by the writer Hilal Isler. It’s about finding home when you least expect it, and about James Baldwin’s ever-changing relationship with home throughout his life. Baldwin famously fled New York and lived in Istanbul, Paris, and multiple places in between. The entire essay is worth your time (as is this New Yorker article and Giovanni’s Room and Native Sons), but this passage, summing up Baldwin’s experience, especially hit me in the gut.

Once, when a friend encouraged James Baldwin to return to America, or at least to pick one place to settle down permanently, Baldwin told him, he couldn’t settle any one place because he didn’t really belong to any one place. “The place in which I’ll fit will not exist until I make it,” he said, and I wonder if this holds true for others, too … Those of us who grow identities, like skins, only to shed them, expand into new ones. Those of us who carry our sense of belonging like belongings, turtles and shells. We arrive at night, unannounced, battered suitcase in hand. We move our things into a four-level-split in suburban Calgary, or out of a modest apartment in 1950s Harlem, and all of it can feel like home, or none of it can. It depends on us: on how much we allow ourselves to attach, to settle, to stay; on how much others allow us to do these things as well.

In fact, home is not, James Baldwin would write in Giovanni’s Room, a place at all, but an irrevocable condition. In a 1957 letter to a high school friend, Baldwin would insist it was necessary to “get over” the idea that there was some place out there where he would fit in once he had “made some real peace” with himself. There was no such place. Maybe there was no such peace or, if there was, it was fleeting, slippery, unsteady.

A person’s inner and outer environments were one and the same, Baldwin wrote, and those of us in the in-between understand the truth of this, too. Those of us not anchored to some specific geography, some patch of land, we understand turtles and shells. We see home as an inward condition, a reality we don’t just create, but are constantly creating. We realize home is a place we make, and that makes us, again and again and again.

Hoping you’re finding home wherever you might be.

Happy almost New Year, friends.