instructions

4 August 2017

For someone who has spent nearly an entire year and a half pondering and writing on the meaning of “home,” I’ve been having a hell of a time finding anything worthwhile to say about it now that I’m actually here. Home, I mean – and this time the concrete sort, the “home” that means the house where I grew up, the bedroom where I slept nearly every night for the first twenty years of my life, the town where my entire family lives and has lived for three generations now, the town where I go to the photo lab to have my film developed and am almost immediately recognized as a Macdonald because the man who owns it knew my aunt in high school. Home home.

It is both the subject and the source of my problem, because of this small detail: home doesn’t really feel like home anymore.

This, I think, is perhaps an experience shared between anyone who has left and come back. It’s like culture shock, but worse, because you’re not really expecting it, no matter how much you try to mentally prepare yourself to re-adjust; you feel almost betrayed, abandoned, affronted, because this closest of places no longer feels entirely your own, and you don’t feel like you entirely belong to it either. My very first night back, after the excitement had passed and the nearly forty-eight hours of sleeplessness and jet lag had hit, I sat on the very edge of the chair in the living room, looking around in spooked silence, like a small animal frozen in fear after being released into a new environment. The next morning I woke up, panicking, afraid for those first few seconds of consciousness that nothing had been real; it took me weeks to figure out how to let the separate experiences of being gone and being home exist within me at the same time.

My backpack had been left behind in China on the very last leg of my journey – I barely made my connecting flight, and my bag didn’t even come close. It was delivered safely to my house the next day; I’d preceded it to San Francisco by only a few hours, but I nearly cried with relief when I saw it again – not because it carried anything of specific value, but because it felt like the only familiar thing I had. I was afraid to unpack it for weeks. Instead I unpacked all the boxes that I’d left stored underneath my aunt and uncle’s house while I was gone. It felt, eerily, like digging through the contents of someone else’s life. I knew when I left that I wouldn’t be able to measure how much I’d changed over the course of the year until I returned home, back to a fixed place, but nonetheless seeing the material summation of who I was before spread out in my room, next to the material summation of who I was now – a tired backpack, a dirty pair of boots, an overstuffed journal – was shocking.

I gave most of my old things away.

Clothes, papers, anything that no longer fit or had lost its relevance to my life were all purged, reorganized, and repacked. What was comforting amidst the emotional exhaustion of this effort were the things I recognized. By “recognized” I mean something that I felt on some level belonged to me still, that it had been mine before and was still mine now. Some commonality bound these things together through the before and after; everything that was not bound fell away. It is an interesting thing to view belongings in this way, as a physical map of self. In his book The Problem of Pain (in which he grapples with the problem of evil and how it relates to the Christian concept of God), C.S. Lewis writes of this feeling, something that I believe is relevant and powerful outside of any religious context:

“You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put it into words…you have stood before some landscape, which seems to embody what you have been looking for all your life…[an] ineffable suggestion by which you are transported. Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction which the others are curiously ignorant of – something, not to be identified with, but always on the verge of breaking through, the smell of cut wood in the workshop or the clapclap of water against the boat’s side?…that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it – tantalising glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest – if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say “Here at last is the thing I was made for.” We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all.”

This secret signature, this ineffable suggestion, is louder to me now. I can’t name it, and maybe I never will, but I’m hot on its trail. I can see its coattails whipping around the next corner in front of me. And so I sorted my things accordingly.

When this was done, I believed I would feel better, that I would settle in and be home properly; in some ways, this was true. The fear of having my past experiences slip away from me faded in intensity and my memories grew in strength whenever I thought or spoke of them. The house where I grew up stopped shimmering with a strange dream-like quality when I realized that believing in its reality didn’t make anything else less concrete. I began to enjoy reintroducing myself to my hometown; I liked to pick out what had changed and what had remained the same, liked to drive around and not have to worry about getting lost, smiled as I counted the number of cars I passed with wetsuits hanging out to dry on the driver’s side mirror. I unpacked my backpack, and it felt alright. I talked to my friends from overseas, and that felt alright too. Mostly, I felt alright. Mostly.

There were signs that all was not well: restless sleep, irritation, difficulty concentrating, the realization that I couldn’t really articulate what I was feeling, that I felt alone in a vast space even when I was surrounded by people I loved. I would find myself dissociating, going away in my mind from whatever was happening in front of me because it suddenly didn’t feel right, like wearing a t-shirt that used to be your favorite but has shrunk in the wash and is now just a little too tight around the armpits; like being out at a bar with your friends and feeling struck with a terrible longing to be home, to not be in this awful noisy crowded place anymore, but having no idea where home is or how to get there.

This is the fault of no one and no thing. It is just the way it is. There is immeasurable loss in this discomfort. There is also growth and light, like a cleansing flame, although usually one must wallow around in the mud and darkness a bit first.

It took me a while to accept all this as just a standard part of processing how much I and my life have changed. It was not a gradual change, either; it was bold and sudden, and so the recoil was simply that much stronger. You can consider it a matter of questionably realistic physics, if you’d like – I moved rapidly through a lot of time and space this year, and when I stopped moving the weight of all that time and space finally had a chance to catch up. And catch up it did, like a ten-car commuter train rear-ending a Toyota Camry.

Tomorrow, I’m moving to Berkeley. It’s something I’ve both longed for and dreaded at alternating times this summer, occasionally feeling both at the same time. Now it just sort of feels normal. This is the way that I have chosen to direct my life; this is the way that I’m going and I’ll sort it out along the way, adjusting as needed. There is comfort in knowing that I have been doing that all year, and I can certainly do it again now. I haven’t forgotten how. Whether or not I will feel more at home in Berkeley is hard to say; I suspect that to some degree I will. I will have my own space that I create, I will be fully in charge of my own life, in a place that is both new and familiar; in many ways it is the perfect bridge between being gone and being home. However, permanence has not really done a very good job of establishing itself as a major theme in my life over the past year and a half, and it’s still slacking now: even my time in Berkeley has an end that is already visible on the horizon. I predict more rising wind in the months and years ahead of me, the kind that makes the dogs bark, the horses pause in their grazing to prick their ears towards the distant hills, and the residents of the house look outside at the wild sky and feel that unnameable itch, that “ineffable suggestion.” I’m really not sure when the wind will ever die down; in some ways I secretly hope that it never will.

Before I left, I shared on this blog a poem by Neil Gaiman, called “Instructions.” It held great meaning to me then, as it does now – I predicted, rightfully so, that I might need it again in the future. So I’d like to leave you with the conclusion to that poem, in case you ever need to find your way back, even if you only stay for a little while:

Instructions

Remember your name.

Do not lose hope—what you seek will be found.

Trust ghosts. Trust those that you have helped

to help you in their turn.

Trust dreams. Trust your heart, and trust your story.

When you come back, return the way you came.

Favors will be returned, debts be repaid.

Do not forget your manners.

Do not look back.

Ride the wise eagle (you will not fall).

Ride the silver fish (you will not drown).

Ride the gray wolf (hold tightly to his fur).

There is a worm at the heart of the tower; that is

why it will not stand.

When you reach the little house, the place your

journey started, you will recognize it, although it will seem

much smaller than you remember.

Walk up the path, and through the garden gate

you never saw before but once.

And then go home. Or make a home.

Or rest.