Homesick For a Place That Doesn't Exist

For the first time in my life, I feel homesick - a deep sense of longing for the comfort and safety of childhood. I feel homesick for a place that doesn't exist. It doesn't exist because the home that I grew up in is not the kind of home that you long for or miss. It isn't a place that you ever look forward to returning to - it's a place you hope to get out of, you dread going back to, and you spend a lifetime trying to get over it. What I long for is just an idea, a fabrication. It's a figment of my imagination built out of other peoples’ stories.

I wonder sometimes what it would be like to go home to a place where I still had a bedroom that still had my own things in it. The benign remnants of my childhood like old art work, favorite toys and books - things that might evoke fond memories or make me laugh. There isn't much left, only photographs really. Photographs and memories – but they are memories that can't quite be trusted.

I like to think sometimes that I escaped my childhood and in escaping, I left it all behind. The exact moment that I thought I had escaped was when I first moved to Chicago after graduating from undergrad. It was only a matter of time before I realized that the past had beaten me to Chicago and already unpacked and settled in before I even got there. I hadn’t escaped - I had merely survived, which is entirely different.

My home is here in Chicago, or wherever I go, but it isn’t where I came from. What is left of my childhood exists really only in my mind, and is recreated sometimes when I spend time with close family and friends who have known me my entire life. We laugh about it sometimes, but the truth is, I don’t ever really know whether to laugh or cry. I just miss a time and a place where I could feel safe and secure, free from worry and anxiety and the things in life that children shouldn’t have to deal with. I miss these things that I’ve never had and I miss them tremendously for some reason. I’m homesick for a place that I can only imagine and a place that doesn’t really exist.

This Too Shall Pass

My brother seems to know a lot of people who are doing this, writing blogs I mean, so I thought I might give it a whirl. Of course, like any overly self-conscious person, I’m afraid I have nothing interesting or intelligent to say and that no one will take the time to read this anyway. Fear of rejection I guess - just like the fear of having a party and no one showing up, so you don’t have the party, and you will never find out whether anyone would have come. I’ve actually never tested this out. I’ve never thrown a party at my own house. Besides the unnecessary stress over what to title this blog, I seem to have a lot of anxiety about what to write about. I don’t live in a foreign country or have a new family to write about, my job is not particularly interesting to anyone else and I have no real hobbies to speak of at the moment – something I am trying to remedy. I’m basically a corporate lawyer at a really large firm in a big Midwestern city – which is not really inspiring me here.

Unfortunately, the biggest things in my life – the two most life changing things that have ever happened to me, both in one year – are the two things that I’ve tried the hardest to keep secret. I am nine months into the best and the worst year of my entire life and unsure whether to write about it or where to begin, although I am quite sure that these are the things that now define me, and these are the things that will shape me going forward. I live every day in fear of people finding these two secrets out, and I am beginning to feel like my life is not authentic because I can’t seem to just be honest about who I am.

The title of this blog and this initial post is one of my favorite slogans from twelve-step programs although I hear these slogans elsewhere from time to time. If I had to capture everything about my life right at this moment in a single phrase, it is summed up in this slogan. I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately, reminding myself that the good and the bad and everything in between is momentary. I was sick a couple of weeks ago and I spent most of the time lying in bed and wondering if I would ever feel better, if I would ever feel the way I used to and dwelling on the thought that the moment I was caught up in was permanent – a permanent state of feeling bad, a permanent circumstance that I could not live with.

I’ve learned a lot in the past nine months that I am not even sure how to put into words - like I said – I don’t even know where to begin – in fact, I’m starting to wonder if this blog won’t be nothing but an account of life lessons I probably should have learned (like everyone else did) but somehow missed. Anyway, the temporary nature of things is what has been plaguing my mind lately. People say, if you don’t like something, just wait a few minutes and it will change. Even those circumstances in life that have turned out to be permanent – and there really aren’t many of them – the way I feel about them always changes. What seems to trouble me right now about knowing that everything is temporary, is accepting that the good stuff is temporary also, and that I’ve been so caught up in everything except the good stuff, that I have missed out on moments that are irreplaceable. Why is it that the things we most want to be over seem to last forever and the things we want to savor pass us by in a second?

So, I guess I am just going to be honest. I am going to write about myself here, the secrets I’ve been keeping, my experiences as of late and my struggle to live through them and learn from them, while I try to savor them, appreciate them, and also let go of them.