Where is home?

I'm back in my blog which can only mean one thing: I'm restless. I'm thinking too much. I'm feeling too much. I'm overwhelmed with something and I don't yet know what it is. I so want to identify it - name it - put it in a box and control it - but I can't. It kept me up last night until 2:30AM - it kept me pacing around the house talking to myself - talking to the floor and the walls and the couch and the blanket - asking these things why they contain me - why they hold me here - if here is where I should be - if this is where I belong - and most importantly do I belong anywhere?

I remember sitting at the lunch table in middle school thinking that I didn't belong and no one liked me - here I am 25 years later and I still feel like that kid at the lunch table looking around at all the other kids wondering if I'm the only one that feels this way. I can't put my finger on it. I don't know what it is that causes this feeling but I want it to go back in to its murky darkness.

I'd like to run away for a few months and see if in running I can't find some answers - but where would I go? Wherever I go I take myself and that's really what I need a break from last night. I was in all the places I've lived for any significant amount of time in one week and it has me reeling. I grew up in California and I love it there - I love the mountains and the trees and the golden poppies - but it isn't home anymore. I was in Dallas for a friend's birthday and I don't like it there yet I sat across from three very dear friends and had a real conversation with them about real things and as much as I don't love it in Texas I felt me and real and seen and heard and loved - but it isn't home either. Then I came back to my current residence in Chicago and I love it here too. I love the lake and the changing seasons and the politics and the acceptance - but it's a lonely place - people here are busy and hurried and I am busy and hurried and I work and worry too much and my partner and I have very few moments these days where we sit across the table and don't just look at each other - we SEE each other. Yet I am seen in this place. I am in a relationship for the first time in my entire life where someone has seen me for exactly who I am - the good, the bad, the really bad and the divine - where they have seen all of that and they like and love me for it all - not in spite of it but for it.

So where is home? Is home where my partner is? Is home where my friends are? Is home where my parents are? Will I ever have a home if I don't learn to be my own safe haven? Will I ever have a home if I don't first befriend myself? Will I ever have a home if I don't take care of my health and my happiness? I know the answer. Right now I have no home because I don't fully dwell in myself.

I can't take a page out of Eat, Pray, Love and go find myself in beautiful exotic places and in the end fall in love and have an exciting romance. I have a job and responsibilities and a relationship that I cherish and so I need to find a way to have that experience here, in my office or in my living room or while taking a picture. I do need an Eat, Pray, Love moment but the food that I eat needs to be nourishment of my soul and esteem for myself and not more pasta...the prayer that I pray needs to be for shedding the things I don't need rather than finding more and the love that I find has to be for myself and my value and not for another (I have that already).

Writing it is the easy part. Now I have to figure out how to do it. I have to figure out how not to have this same type of post the next time I sit down at the computer to spill my overflowing thoughts...I don't want to bore myself and anyone reading with the same questions year after year after year...

This is something I can say from the bottom of my heart - and it seems appropriate since it just became Thanksgiving day a few minutes ago - I am grateful. I am so very grateful. I have this heaviness I carry around inside me and I'm not my own best cheerleader but I am blessed and I am aware of how blessed I am every day. I am gainfully employed and loved by a wonderful human and have a few good friends in this world that love me very much. I am blessed. I am loved and I do deserve that love. Now I need a home.