Home is Where the Home is

I'm back where I began. But... it's different this time.

Welcome to the Great Job Nat™ Sunday Newsletter! My freebie thinkpiecething I will once again be sending out every week. If you want access to DEAR DIARIES (random thoughts / cartoons / more personal tidbits I send to subscribers a few x a month to really solidify our parasocial friendships), upgrade here. All of you paid subscribers help keep the lights on and I love ya xoxo <3

There’s something about home.

Big auditorium word: HOME. Oh, what you can fit inside those letters. Where is home? Home can be where you’re from. Home can be where you belong. Those aren’t always the same place. Often, they’re not.

Home in the crook of someone’s neck. Home in someone’s smell. Home inside routine. Home inside nostalgia. Home promises permanency but reveals itself temporary; a place to rest your head that’s about as reliable as a game of whack-a-mole. Just as you lean toward Home, a place of peace and rest, just as you’re about to close your eyes—it’s gone.

Oop! Disappeared down the hole! Wait, there it is, it just popped back up! Home! Gah, almost got it! Wait, I see it! Where’d it go? No! That fleeting home feeling! It’s gone again…

Life as Home. Your whole life—can you make that your home? That way, home can never leave you. Life as Home as a House, inside walls. You can define your life like that. You can confine your life like that. The status quo of your daily life can feel as defined and confined and as permanent as a dictionary definition. Your friends and your coffee order and your bills and your car and your walks around the neighborhood. White-knuckling Home. Sameness as Home. This is my life and so this is how it shall always be. Else, what? If you change, then _____?

If you leave the House that you tell yourself is Home, then you’ll explode like a stack of dropped papers. Right? Lost constitution, no nucleus, leaves with no trunk. So, you hold onto the bars in the unlocked cage of your routine, as if that’s what’s giving your life shape…

What am I getting at?

Where is “home?” :(

The idea of home has been on my mind especially these days. Personally and societally. In part, because I just moved to a new city. In part, because so many people are being forced to leave their homes. Families split, half to-go, half to-stay; does that feeling of home move with the family that left? Does it snap with the sinew of a body pulled apart?

Referencing Curtis White's Living in a World That Can't Be Fixed, he says: "Human cultures are about place: where to live, and home: how to live and with whom. In Western capitalist culture, home is where the money is. And place, increasingly, is an abstraction… scattered to the virtual winds, with each ever-more-advanced smart gizmo that we plug in our ears, strap to our wrists, and, with the innovations of the smart home, sleep in, securely we imagine. Come the day when these abstractions fail —the collapse of the financial system, or the energy infrastructure, or the failure of the climate itself — we will realize that we were in truth always out of place and homeless."

Our modern conception of home has become dangerously superficial. An abstraction, a collection of objects and technologies—an ApartmentTherapy apartment! a trad-wife’s perfect kitchen! an Architectural Digest McMansion!— rather than a fundamental sense of place within ourselves and the world. The homeless and the placeless in our communities give us a sense of anxiety about our own precarious senses of place. We’re all on a precipice, maybe. A paycheck or a breakdown away from having no place at all.

Our baseline desire, according to White, "as with any animal… [is] the pleasure of homeostasis. What we all want, refugees included, is the maintenance of the pleasure of being well-warm, fed, companionable, outward looking, and safe." But humans' need for home has evolved beyond just a need for "habitat." White explains humanity's deeper need through what he calls "N+1"—the idea that we are creatures of perpetual accumulation, always wanting one more something.

According to the N+1 theory, it's not enough that any one person has just the basics of home—they will always want the basics + 1. If you have a bicycle, you'll want a bicycle + another bicycle. A car? You'll want a car + another freakin' car. If you give a mouse a cookie, he will want a cookie + another cookie + a house in which he can eat his cookie + a yacht to go with his house so he can eat more cookies out on the water because eating cookies on land is so basic and boring.

I’m not sure I agree the idea that this desire is “native.” Desire is manufactured. Isn’t it? Imposed by society. Maybe I’m misunderstanding what he means by native. Don’t we all know that an overpriced ideal this isn’t what we really long for? Home as proof of worth…

True home, I think, is about feeling the shape of your existence within the greater mass that is the Everything. The Everyone. Isn’t it? If every single person is a spot on a map, then feeling At Home is to feel rooted in the coordinates of your personal, unique place in the world and feeling they're true. Knowing not just where you are, but that you belong there, that your presence fits meaningfully into the larger pattern of existence.

White identifies a profound truth about displacement: when people become refugees or homeless, they lose more than physical shelter. They are reduced to what philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls "bare life"—stripped down to one’s body alone, cut off from the networks of belonging that define human existence, severed from one’s place in the world. What they've lost isn't satisfied by accumulating more things, but by recovering their coordinates, their sense of belonging within something larger than themselves. The refugee's deepest need isn't just for a roof over their head—it's for reintegration into the fabric of existence, for the restoration of their place in the human constellation.

Mama, I’m Home

From LA back to the Bay

We are all, in some sense, seeking our coordinates.

In Agnès Varda and JR's documentary Faces Places, we encounter a man with barely a buck to his name. By definition, he’s “homeless,” but he’s created an elaborate shelter decorated with found objects and personal treasures. There’s something very appealing about it all. Is it just a “sad delusion” that he feels at home, in this taped-together place of his own creation? Or is he free? At home in a world of his own making…

New York was my home for a while. A beautiful two years. I left while the city and I were still very much in love. Then, I had to move to Los Angeles for work. Showbiz, baybee. Los Angeles, unfortunately, never felt quite like home.

(Sorry, LA.) (Los Angeles was like staying on a friends’ couch for 8 years, emotionally speaking.) (Sparsely furnished and never quite showered, emotionally speaking.) (Like, I had my own apartments. I didn’t actually live on friends’ couches. But my catchphrase was “Get me outta here!” you know what I mean?) (I love my friends there, though!) (And it’s totally cool if you love it there! I’m not judging!) (Why do I feel like Los Angeles can hear me?) (You’re not a bitch, LA! And we can still totally be friends with benefits…)

I recently moved back to the Bay Area in California, where I was born and raised. Breathing my native flavor of air. Home can be where you’re from. Home can be where you belong. Those aren’t always the same place. Sometimes, they are.

For whatever combination of reasons/coordinates/circumstances, I feel at Home. I wonder how long the feeling will last. Of course, I know better than to trust it. Can’t trick me! Home will disappear down a hole like an unwhacked mole.

But maybe this time, it won’t.

Until next week bbs,

x Nat