Nothing said “home” to me more than an empty house

Home is about walking what’s real—and not away—or alone.

Today’s essay is part of a fifth series by a group of men writing here on Substack including myself,

Latham Turner

,

Joshua Doležal

,

Lyle McKeany

,

Dee Rambeau

, and

Michael Mohr's Sincere American Writing

. You may recall our past series on fatherhood, work, “recovery,” and trust. This series is on home.

TL;DR — I had to leave because home drove me away; eventually my body started to tell me to stay; home and love are both about staying, and going deeper; seeking more is natural but also a never-ending escape and can be an addictive pattern; staying can be just as much of an adventure.

Nothing says “home” to me more than an empty house.

I’m sure that my desire for a peaceful sanctuary is common enough—and for me, it goes right back to how home often was when I was young. I’ve written about the time the cops came, but there were plenty of others. My sister would be in her room screaming and wailing, a locus of chaos that whirled up like a tornado and burst out around the house, overwhelming my senses. My parents did their best, but it was too much for them too. Even though I know the feeling of being struck mute by fury, and my reaction has often been the same, their silence still leaves me stammering.

Between the silence and the fury, I was driven out the basement door and down the street to sit alone on the steps, carefully adjusting my flimsy Walkman headphones, my body held tense between swirling fog and cold concrete, sheltered by grey on all sides.

The first time I really felt like myself was living in Italy, speaking and dreaming in a foreign language. Since then, I’ve been the guy always somewhere else, leaving all the time, never home for long enough to get to know. Wandering and exploring, I’ve been driven, out searching for something else, something away, some magic somewhere that could never be here. First of all: out of reach of my family (just like my own parents, by the way, who put a continent between themselves and where they grew up), but also somewhere different enough so that I’d feel like someone else, or someone, at least. As if I could somehow be made more whole by distance, when a lot of what I brought back was more of being unknown. An adventurous, mysterious stranger. A visitor, even at home.

I’ve had glimpses of these special places over the years. A hidden cabin tucked into a steep, forested slope above the eastern coast of Corsica, left open to the elements. An expat Frenchman’s house in the otherworldly village of Atins, so far from anything that I’ve only arrived there by sea and departed by boat upriver, or simply by walking. A paradisical little rancho way back in the arroyos of Baja California Sur. The islands off Stockholm, or Maine, or in Puget Sound. I moved through all of these places, hardly stopping long enough to breathe them in, and yet they’ve stayed with me as icons of home. Places that seemed like they could have been my own, in some other life—and then I’d be moving on, and often thinking, “what about this life?”

Maybe my distance from home—and from myself—explains why it took me until my mid-late forties to have much of a relationship with my intuition, and even then I still didn’t have ’gut feelings.’ As my mom would put it, I had an “iron gut”—and so instead the voice of my unconscious shows up in phrases like “Say Everything,” symbols like a “6” on my palm—or a feeling in my legs. Now, at fifty-four, I still love spicy food, but I’m finding myself much more sensitive to my stomach, and much more receptive to the messages that do now often arrive in the form of actual gut feels.

Just the other day, as I was preparing to head out on a backpacking trip with a couple of friends, I bagged up six days worth of dehydrated food, weighed my bear can, packed my pack, and laid it out on the wooden slat bench in my bedroom, all ready to go for the next morning. The evening sun painted the rising tide outside my windows a shimmering, golden blue—and, perhaps with a shift in the balance of my loosely moored floating home, my stomach began to churn.

I ran through my various whys for leaving. I love the high Sierra more than just about any other place on Earth, and I’ve been trying to make a point of getting up there more often. For once, I would just be tagging along with someone else, so I didn’t have to lead the trip, or even get the permits. I’d been invited. My gear was dialed. The weather looked perfect. The timing was right. I had a pile of good reasons—all too many, really, given the twisting in my guts.

My belly was still bothering me the next morning. There didn’t seem to be any serious issue with my digestion, but it was clear that I’d almost suckered myself into going on a trip that I might well have enjoyed, but that my unconscious was doing its best to inform me to avoid.

As much as I love planning for a trip—and adding to the story of me—I’ve felt anxious and sad getting ready to leave home for a long time now. Those feelings grow and grow until I wrench myself out the door—most often into a cab and to the airport, where my wanderlust and willingness to be transported can take over. Home recedes in a redshifted eyeblink to a speck of compressed memories, stored away and outshined by the sparks on the horizon, and I forget. I do become someone else, somewhere else. Once I’m on the road, I often find that I don’t think of home for weeks.

The physiological language of intuition and of the unconscious usually doesn’t express itself as clearly as ’do that,’ but simply “Listen! I have a message for you.” Right then though, as I pictured driving to the trailhead, that message crystallized into “don’t go!” You could also say that I realized that I didn’t have to leave, or that I decided to stay. Decided, realized, understood—subtly different, or the same? For me, they’re all part of the same process, and, most importantly, my stomach stopped complaining.

I’ve had the sense recently that I’ve somehow been in conflict with myself in relationships; for one, that I haven’t really been clear on what I’ve wanted, but even more true is that I haven’t really been aiming for what I have wanted. Just as with place, and with home, I’ve been drifting, exploring, searching—and lost.

I’m tired of being lost, and my recent experiences with my actual gut feelings have helped me understand how such a misalignment could be possible, and what it could mean. I’ve wanted to go, but I needed to stay. I’ve wanted freedom, but I needed home. I needed togetherness, but I thought I wanted something, or someone else. I wanted to stay, but I felt that I had to leave—and then, leaving broke my heart.

People who don’t know me all that well still think of me as the guy who’s always traveling, but it’s been some time since that was true. In fact, the person who knows me best these days said just the other day that I’m becoming something of a “homebody”—until very recently, not something that I would have wanted to hear about myself. Now I don’t mind at all, although I do wonder if there’s a word that means something similar, without the negative valence that homebody has acquired.

I have learned and dismantled all the words in order to draw from them a single word: home.

— Mahmoud Darwish

My body does want to be at home. After all these years of trying to leave, I love here more than ever. Sure, it’s not Italy, Brazil, the Philippines, Japan, or one of a hundred other places I’ve been or would love to go to, but I swear there hasn’t been a day this year that I haven’t woken up and gone to sleep blessed, grateful, and praying for more of the same.

I love being at home.

Just as with place though, I’ve looked for some secret special spice of love. The more exotic, the better—and the farther away. I’ve dragged my ass all over the world, hoping that I just might be compelled to stay, searching for something shapeless and magical, someone that would draw out the me that I wanted to be, that I knew I could be.

One place wasn’t enough for me. One woman or another wasn’t enough for me. I was dissatisfied with here, and I was dissatisfied with her. I love this place, and yet I wanted to get away from this place and the cold, grey past that still lives here, just as I’ve loved women and then wanted to get away from them, because of the darkness that slowly filled the space between us. My attachment styles? Avoidant, sure, like my parents—but more like desperate, delirious, disappointed, and depressed—usually in that order.

My experience is that by the time that I become aware that some change is happening, most of it has happened. The fact is that even with all my travels, I’ve lived in San Francisco almost all my life already, and in just two places for the past twenty years. Potrero Hill and Sausalito are two very real versions of paradise for a Frisco kid like me.

Those years have shown me that there’s a door that opens when I stay, a door that gives way to a world of growth and possibilities. It’s still hard for me to believe that this world could be as big, and as rich, as the one that I might find elsewhere, but the evidence is in. I’m connected. My board is full. I’m doing my own writing, freelancing, editing, translating, consulting, inventing. I’ll admit, it still sounds exciting to move overseas and live a whole different life in another language, but… why would I leave?

The truth is that all that leaving had me torn up something terrible. I’m getting OK with staying, in part because I can see now that I want stability.

I’ve scoffed at “commitment” as a sort of weak magic—as if I could just say the right thing, then that would make me want to stay. Man, I’ve tried, and that just leads to confusion and disaster. At the same time, I’ve known for years if I actually wanted to be known in my home town, I’d have to commit to actually being here more. I took that in, I changed how I was living—and now I am known, part of this world here. More recently, after four years of not even having a fixed address, I steered again towards finding home. I almost veered again into confusion and misadventure, but I paid attention—and, at one point, paid the price to cancel a contract—but I found what I was looking for.

I no longer feel so torn between leaving and staying. I want to stay because staying more allows me to be more of the me I want to be.

I’m not longer in conflict with myself in that way, and now I’m starting to see how allowing myself to be guided by my deep desire for togetherness is the sort of commitment that I can understand, and it feels like a path toward unwinding the conflict that I’ve felt with myself in relationship.

I’ve made a lot of major changes in my life guided by intuition and intention—selling my business, changing my relationship with alcohol, moving from a first to a second, and now a third career—and I know that while I have some very strong patterns in relationship, as Todd Baratz puts it, “patterns are simply reenactments that offer us the opportunity to repair and heal.”

Whether we form them consciously or unconsciously, patterns are changed by forming new patterns.

I was always obsessed with leaving, but began to see that that wasn’t as good for me as I thought it was. I took responsibility for my own well-being.

I didn’t have to continue reenacting that same pattern forever. I rewired myself. ‘People never change’ may be truth to a cynic, but I’ve seen from my own experience that it’s very possible to grow and move on, to unlearn old patterns and develop new ones. We’re just as wired for growth and change as we are to form habits and patterns. In fact, habits are a form of learning and growth.

One of the specific patterns that’s changed is of relating to home as less, as if here is intrinsically less interesting than there. Now I’m seeing that’s not, or no longer true, and that’s allowing me to reframe home from being a place where I sacrifice ’more’ to a place where I get to be more. Similarly, I’m seeing that I’ve often related to others as less, as if somehow I’ve deserved more adventure, more excitement, more stories, more beauty, more ease—and in shifting this I’m feeling less entitled to an extra-ordinary unknown and more grateful for the real and the known.

I still idolize adventurers and explorers, but as I’ve spent more time in one place, I’ve come to see that there are just as many people who are just as attached to home as I was to being away. Likewise, I’m seeing that while it made sense at the time to move on from so many relationships that felt like not enough, walking away from love is even more painful than leaving home, and not something I can stand to do to myself any longer.

Another pattern that I’ve recognized is how much my seeking new places and people resembles the over-expressed seeking of addictive behavior. On one hand, the wanting more that comes from what Michael Easter describes as our “scarcity brain” is the source of our creative and generative energy—and our fundamental drive to survive and to thrive—but at this point am I really seeking “more,” or just more connection?

yung_pueblo

A post shared by @yung_pueblo

Thinking back to how I’ve always relished the calm of an empty house, I’m more aware now of how that peace is often achieved in isolation. I get the quiet that my childhood nervous system needed by choosing not to be with others, but I also get more alone. It turns out that, for me, it takes just as much courage to reach out for connection as it does to go out into the world for adventure. The result is a different kind of growth, perhaps less dramatic, less awe-inspiring, less bracing, but more warmer, closer, and more secure.

And so it was that last month, instead of trekking in the wilderness and sleeping under the stars, I went hiking on the local mountain, sailing in the Bay, climbing at the gym, had a double-date dinner with friends, and showed up for my niece’s eighth birthday. Instead of leaving, I spent time at home—and you know what? I don’t know what would be happening if I was traveling all over the place like I used to, but it wouldn’t be what is happening—and I like what is happening.

I know from personal experience how “the path is made by walking,” and what I’m seeing is that “home” is the path that is as opposed to a fantasy of what might be. Home is no longer an empty house. Home is about walking what’s real—and not away—or alone.

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The series on “Home”

Setting down roots

Home Is The Native Soil Of The Heart

Home: A Place or a Feeling?

A Homecoming

Home is where your people are

Further Reading

• Past series pieces — We Need Wild Fathers • Earning My Bread • Against Recovery • How trust emerges naturally from self-awareness—and eating well

• Home — Who Holds You? • The Last Time • Staying

• Lessons — Advice is Weak Magic • Say Everything • Life as a Goat • Selling my business • Alcohol

• Just one reason / “Via Negativa” — Nassim Taleb, Antifragile

• Rewiring Patterns — Todd Baratz, How to Love Someone Without Losing Your Mind • Sadhguru, Inner Engineering • Michael Easter, Scarcity Brain: Fix Your Craving Mindset and Rewire Your Habits to Thrive with Enough

• Seeking — Yung Pueblo, Inward Trilogy

• The Path — Border of a Dream: Selected Poems of Antonio Machado • Puett & Gross-Loh, The Path

Questions for you

1. What’s your own relationship with home?

2. What role does commitment play in your personal philosophy?

3. Are there patterns that you’ve recognized that are related to home, for you?

4. Where is home for you, and what led you to find it?

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