Published: 2025-01-18T09:04:30Z
What is Home? Part II
Home is a place, a feeling. It's more than one place. It's where you live currently, but also where you come from. It's where your family is, or was. This is what I said in my blog post about this almost one year ago.
Two and a half years ago, in summer 2022, we moved to a new country. Two and a half years ago, we changed everything about our lives.
I am becoming more at peace with my new home. But it's not perfect. Nothing is. I spent much of the past 2.5 years fighting against this new place, that I now must call home. Coming here, staying here, was not by choice. It was a clouded decision, and I think it was ultimately the wrong decision. But it was still the decision that I agreed with and supported, and I have to live with the consequences of that decision, likely for the next decade or more.
For the past year, I turned inward from depression and being overwhelmed. Now, I am finally starting to come back out of that shell. I am coming to terms with my situation, and even learned to appreciate the country we live in, in a way. It's a nice country, a safe one.
But there is still much to be done. The hard work remains.
Making Peace
I am in the process of making peace with two things:
- I will never truly consider the place I live now as home. It is a place I must endure.
- I will endure this place, and even find beauty in it, for the sake of myself and my family.
This started about one year ago, at the end of 2023/beginning of 2024. I recognized that I needed to change my attitude towards where we now live. At the time, I simply couldn't do it. Even now, it's very difficult. This refusal, and the stress resulting from it, has almost destroyed my life on multiple occasions. But for the sake of my own sanity, and the sake of my family, I HAVE to get with the program.
The first breakthrough was when I decided that I would not and could not truly feel at peace where I live now. It was a way out, a way to focus the rage and betrayal that I felt in summer 2022. It's a way to give my feelings a name and make them into something coherent: “I did it. I tried to live here, and I decided it's not for me.” For many people, this would be the point where they returned from where they came. But I cannot do that: I am tied here by family. I am stuck.
Now, I am trying to reconcile my necessary present with that decision to survive, rather than thrive, in this place. There is not one thing I can point to that truly screams “progress in emotional processing!” But I do notice the little differences when I go back to the place I consider my true home. When I am there, I feel a little more detached, and a little bit more desire to return to where I currently live. it's probably the most tangible sign of progress that I've noticed, and it's also what inspired me to write this blog post.
Surviving vs Thriving
Ideally, a person would thrive in a new environment, not merely survive in it. But that's not happening for me. Not yet. Possibly not ever. I thrived in the place where I used to live, and I still thrive there when I return. When I'm there, in many ways it feels like I never left. I get to role-play living there for a week or so before returning to my life as it really is: a life of isolation (somewhat self-imposed) as a stranger in a strange land. I do not speak the language of the country where I live. I do not share the culture of the country where I live (and in fact find several parts of it quite hostile and odd).
I am recovering from culture shock, and still dealing with the aftershocks and tremors of the earthquake that uprooted our lives in mid-2022. I once read it took at least 6 months to feel at home in such a drastically new place, and for some people it might even take two years. For me, it's going to take longer.
Two years ago, this place was a prison that I was dragged into, kicking and screaming. A year ago, it was a prison where I could go to the beach sometimes. Today, everything feels a bit “less foreign.” It's hard to call it “familiar.” But I suppose that would be an easier way to phrase it: “everything feels a bit more familiar.” Today, I wouldn't describe my life as being in a prison. But nor would I classify it as living the dream.
Things aren't like they were where I used to live. There, I thrived! But I also failed. But I conveniently forget those problems most of the time. The human mind is impressive: it warps, distorts, suppresses, and changes. We focus on the good things of our past, and minimize the bad parts. I have romanticized my life in the country we previously lived.
I believe that EVERYTHING I feel and experience today ultimately stems from a breakdown I had 6 years ago, where some 25+ years of stress and trauma finally exploded and spilled out. Stress from my job at the time finally broke what coping mechanisms I had, and ground my psyche to dust.
I've been slowly rebuilding my sense of self and emotional state ever since. A growing family and the move added to this stress, and it felt like taking many steps backward, undoing all the progress I had made. Multiple times.
Progress is Not Linear
I've come to realize that progressing towards a healthier mental state is not a line. It's not a ladder one must climb, where “happiness” is at the top and “depression” is at the bottom. That is too simplistic of a model. It's more like a tree, with many branches. The mental breakdown was somebody chopping down the tree (and perhaps setting it on fire and then throwing it into a wood chipper). But in its place, a new sapling sprouts. A sapling that I have to nurture and regrow into a new Tree of Self.
- With the new tree comes new branches.
- Some branches grow faster than others, and they grow higher.
- You begin your climb from the ground once more, and make your way up the branches.
- But then you slip from a higher branch and fall to a lower one!
But instead of falling all the way back to the ground, you're still in the tree. You cautiously make your way back over to the branch you were on before you fell, and while you're not as high up in the tree as you were, you're still IN THE TREE.
The Tree of Self
To put things in more concrete terms, let's say one branch is Family. Another is Social Life. Yet another is Self-Worth. Another is Self-Identity. The list can go on, and is probably specific to each person and each situation.
For me, the branch of Family regrew very slowly in the beginning. My life was turned upside down by starting a family, even though I went into it knowing fully well what was going to happen. To quote a famous line:
You are NOT prepared.
Recently, my “Family branch” has started to grow rapidly. I am finding my place as a parent and member of a family. It feeds into my regrowing branch of Self-Identity, which was similarly crushed and ground into nothingness 6 years ago (and then again 2.5 years ago). The branch of Self-Identity seems to grow much more slowly, and perhaps has been sawed off a few times over the past year. Job changes, the move to a new country, moving between houses, and constantly having to re-“find myself” have made it difficult. It's a similar situation for my social life. THAT branch is the hardest to regrow.
Change in Self-Perception
What I have noticed, especially over 2024, is that my perception of self is changing. I am beginning the transition of seeing myself as a victim and prisoner to seeing myself as a survivor. Hopefully I will eventually leave the fog of irrationality and come to see myself as just a person who has made a series of interesting life decisions. On paper, my life looks well-lived: moved across the world, got a new citizenship, and now I'm doing it all again. I'm a citizen of the world! My children even more-so! A successful career (thus far) and family. On paper, everything looks almost perfect!
The worst part about being in this state of anxiety and depression is that you often KNOW it's all irrational and not (entirely) true. But you can't stop yourself from thinking it must be true. It goes in cycles of rationality and irrationality. But the depression and anxiety do come from somewhere. It's important to remember that not EVERYTHING is just in my head.
The journey back towards happiness is very long, and very difficult. But I'm slowly getting there. Hopefully, a year from now, my outlook is less bleak, or even actually positive!
Would I go back?
Would I leave the place I live now and return to where we lived before? Absolutely, without a doubt, 100%, yes. If the opportunity presented itself, in any shape or form that I could ethically justify, I would leave immediately. And some day, that opportunity WILL come. I will not retire nor die where I live now. That would be giving up. The fight is not dead; it is merely on hold.
Hopefully by the time comes to resume the “fight,” it won't be a fight. Hopefully, it will be a life decision that I can make peacefully: not as a reaction against what I've become, but rather because it's a place where I want to go.
The Final Goals
My goal for 2025 isn't to change my mindset. Directly attacking the problem head-on is tantamount to trying to run my head through a brick wall. I spent two years trying that. First by fighting against the situation itself, then by trying to force myself to change my opinion of the situation. It didn't work either time.
My goal is to be learn to be happy in the present, within the constraints that have been forced upon me. My goal is to synthesize a happy medium between my own opinion and the reality I must navigate. By doing this, I think that my mindset will slowly shift over time. I want to settle into a place where I can recognize the sacrifices I made, to be happy in the present, and to be hopeful for the future. I want to be engaged with life, not merely drifting through it.
Hopefully, it works this time.
License: CC-BY-SA-4.0.
Written by: @[email protected]
