Read This When You Feel Like You Have No Home

I’ve always had this fantasy of getting a tattoo of a world map on my wrist. My friends would ask me, what’s the meaning behind that? And I honestly didn’t know until today.

I have lived in a couple of places: Kentucky, Colorado, England, and New York and I’ve always had this strange feeling, almost as if I never feel completely at home no matter how long I live somewhere. It’s not like I don’t know my way around or don’t have a signature bodega, it’s more a feeling of estrangement, an unknown paralysis that keeps me wondering where my home actually is.

I look back on my life of travel and exploring, whether through movies and books or actual backpacking and I remember all these amazing connections I’ve had with people, places, and stories.

I finally realized that the world is my home.

This is why I want a map of the world on my wrist, to remind myself that I have a life that stretches across the land and sea that will connect me wherever I go. Not having a home gives you the strength to span across the universe and find home with the people you meet and build that home inside yourself.

Nevertheless, having a true and physical home is a beautiful thing. Bouncing around from city to city as an adult can be disheartening. You feel the first date jitters the first few months and it starts to wither away as you begin to see people having more friends and more of a life established and grounded and you begin to feel like a nomad.

The best way to get out of this hump is the age-old saying: wherever you go, there you are.

Be in the city you live. Take every opportunity that comes your way and explore, eat something you’ve never had, go to the concert of that new band, be willing to feel like an outsider and fight your homeless feelings.

Every place you will live will give you something to take away, whether it’s a lesson you wish you didn’t learn or friends you’d never meet anywhere else. 

Wherever you go, there you are.

No matter where you go, you’ll always have yourself so take what you can absorb and become the person whose home is nowhere and everywhere.