Leaving home has been the hardest thing I’ve repeatedly done. I have lived in nearly 20 homes and held as many jobs in my lifetime. With all the moving, one would be wrong to think I embrace change. Like a novice enduring the five stages of grief, I struggle through each episode of “leaving home.”
The Grief Stages
In some ways, denial starts long before the call for change. It comes when I’m working on making a new place my home. I decorate the new space like it’s the last place I’ll live, the last job I’ll hold, and the final position I’ll take on a matter. It comes when I’m building a community I never want to leave. In denial, I pretend this is my forever home because my heart can’t stand knowing yet another transition is around the corner.
When the call to adventure comes, anger replaces denial. I resent the change before me. Never mind how good or reasonable it seems, it’s never clear enough. The path ahead rarely seems illuminated beyond the next small step. I feel like a child again, with little control over the twists and turns others orchestrate. Enraged, I mourn the familiarity of home.
When anger wanes, I attempt to negotiate my way out of the adventure. I ask for a more convenient call, an indefinite extension of the deadline. I present the many reasons why now is not ideal. But the call persists.
Depression sets in when the reality of the call usurps my bargained wishes and I realize I’m going to be leaving home, again. When my heart becomes numb from all the feelings, I retreat to my quiet thoughts. It makes no sense to engage my beloved home; it’s lost its peace. Socializing reminds me of what I’ll miss. The beauty around me no longer rejuvenates me. The stability I’d taken for granted, before the call, now haunts me. I’m terrified of the unknown. I welcome death more than it. No history of leaving home soothes me now. My sadness soars to unbearable heights.
When I can go no lower in my depression, I resign to accepting the call. I make plans, count regrets, and say goodbyes. Others, unaware of the heart-wrenching journey here, call me brave. But I’m an exhausted coward sick of fighting an all-consuming call. The emotional toll of staying home, dejected, exceeds my fear of exploring the unlit path.
Following the Call
Eventually, after I’ve completed the grieving process, the adventures begin. Leaving home creates and fills voids. It reveals vision blindness and gives new sight. It exposes my self-doubt and shows me I’m enough.
I was 13 when I left the country of my birth for the United States. I barely spoke to anyone outside of my family for a year, although English was my first language. In my mind, this new home was temporary. I didn’t need to participate in it while biding my time. It didn’t help that my self-doubt blossomed in an environment that looked and sounded nothing like home.
Being away from home created deep voids I didn’t believe eternity could fill. But after a year, those voids were filled enough for me to participate by speaking more and writing again. Something about my darkness drew me to light and I found faith in the foreignness of my new home.
I began to see things differently. I could see my birth home and my new home with a new perspective that allowed me to question things I naively thought were good in both places. With that I carry the gift of not fully belonging in either home. That gift, like the call, was hard to accept and felt limiting at times. But great liberation came from accepting it because, when I saw my gift with enlightened eyes, I became enough.
Soon, I realized I was free to create a home that would supersede the limits of all past and future homes. In that home, there would be no rooms for calls that were strangled by fear; but there’d be rooms for each call I accepted. On the walls of those rooms, I’d display the best and worst of an evolving me living my transitory life. Hindsight would show that the depths of me were cultivated from the challenges that came with accepting the calls. And my final home would hold the truest representation of me in ways that all the homes I struggled to leave could never imagine.
Dreams of my final home, the stories that will fill its rooms, make leaving home less dreadful now. I’ve ignored enough calls to know that staying home, when it’s time to leave, means trading peace for the torment of what-ifs. I’ve also accepted enough calls to know we gain more than we lose by leaving home. The home we hold on to is often the one we lose and the home we leave is often the one we keep. So, I hold onto temporary homes with a softer grip, leaving space for my grief stages when the next untimely call comes.