Will I feel like I’m floating forever? -Thoughts on home, the transition back, “what now?” and the inadequacy of language.

Originally published September 2018.

I knew the transition back would be hard, but I didn’t think it would be quite so confusing and filled with longing. 

I’ve been floating for a long time. For the past few years, home has been more of a concept than a reality, a tiny box of warmth I have had to wrap tight and tuck in my pocket to take wherever I go.  It has been so long since I have had a consistent place for home to become something external. 

I haven’t lived anywhere for more than a year since I moved out of my parent’s house when I was 18. I have packed, unpacked, and repacked hundreds of times since then.

I took time off of university three years ago, and since 2015, I have made my bed in over a hundred towns, all over the United States, and now, after my excursions during the first half of 2018, all over the world.

In 2015, home was a two bedroom shack with a bunch of random unnecessary closets above a red-painted Scuba Shop in the mountains, which we somehow crammed five women into. That summer home was my black 2008 Jeep liberty I drove and slept out of across the country, searching for myself and some meaning to keep living for, and it was eventually shared with three of the most beautiful humans, my brother Ethan, my falling-in-love best friends Ben and Lydia, who helped me keep looking. That fall home was a tiny two bedroom apartment on King Street, the space of which was crammed with the big emotions of four people going through a lot all at once, trying to stay sane as we shuffled around each other in the tiniest space for those ten months. June of 2016 home became a 9-passenger VW van filled with the jeep liberty crew plus two more, my brother Ethan, my then engaged best friends Ben and Lydia, and my new addition married best friends Danielle and Lucas, as well as backpacking gear for six people, while we drove through fog, past volcanoes, around glaciers, and next to black sand beaches in Iceland, with Trevor Hall’s albumb Kala playing in the background on repeat. Later that summer home became a giant 11-bedroom cottage I shared first with my co-parent Sara who became a dear friend, and later with my best friend Josh every other week as we tried to co-parent together, making a space for healing and raising a family made up of nine foster children from all over the place who had been taken from theirs. For the last few months of 2016, home became a mattress on the floor of a room with a ceiling so low I could only stand up in the middle. It was inside a tiny white house perched on top of a mountain, with twinkly lights and a hot tub, a record player that played either Sleeping at Last or Gregory Alan Isakov most of the time, and a heater that barely helped your toes thaw in the winter. It was filled with myself and my still-married best friends Danielle and Lucas, along with the lingering scent of whatever gourmet dinner we had splurged on making that week, or the smell of Danielle’s lemon bars baking in the oven. Danielle and Lucas had their own place in an 11-bedroom cottage filled with a giant family of kiddos across from mine, so we all drove away from our tiny white house every other tuesday morning to go to our cottages, leaving white mountain house empty for those weeks. Then in January 2017, since I only needed somewhere to sleep the two weeks every month I wasn’t at work, most of home was either given away, sold, or boxed up, shrunk down to fit in the trunk of the gold 2003 Toyota Highlander I had recently bought, which I would live out of for the entirety of the year when I was not at the foster home. Throughout last year, home was carried in my car wherever I drove, and it sometimes extended outside of its walls to couches, floors, hammocks, tents, and occasionally beds. Sometimes in houses or yards of friends I already knew, sometimes in houses or yards of strangers that quickly became friends through the couchsurfing community, sometimes in the woods, sometimes in a town I knew, sometimes in towns I had never been to before. 

And then I bought a one-way ticket to New Zealand.

Which meant that I eventually quit my job at the foster home, picked out the most important things from “home” in my Toyota Highlander, and shrunk home down to fit in my Blue-green Osprey backpack, the new concentrated home I would literally carry on my back for the five and a half months until I returned to America.

So for the first half of 2018, the walls of my home were more flexible and could be sinched down with straps and draw strings, my closet became a stuff sack filled with a few clothes, my shoes didn’t really have a place besides on my feet, and my hygeine products became reduced to no more than a toothbrush and tiny bottles of toothpaste, shampoo, conditioner, Dr. Bronner’s soap for body wash and laundry detergent, and deodorant, which was more of a splurge item, for my sanity and those next to me on all of the cramped, sweaty, long bus rides through terrible Asia roads.

I left. And *still* married couple best friends Danielle and Lucas came with me.

Throughout my time away, home extended from my backpack and filled the insides of our dear little Nissan Vanette we bought in New Zealand named “Beep-Boop,” and though I’ve never shared a smaller space with one other person (much less two), he kept us safe from the intense sun and heavy rains when we weren’t hiking crazy mountains. Then home extended to a friend’s giant RV bus for a week in a church parking lot on the North Island. Then three different houses of kind strangers-turned-friends in Aukland. Then home extended to a farm house in a tiny town in rural Australia for a couple weeks. Then home extended to three more three strangers-turned-friends’ houses in Bali, as well as a Balinese family compound in a small village that welcomed me in as one of their own, playing with the kids and weaving offering baskets with grandma. Then a little hut hostel on Nusa Penida, a bunch of random guest houses in rural Laos, a tree house above the Thai family who became family right away, as we spent our nights laughing and playing Rummy, guitar strings being plucked away in the background.

Then *now married* Ben and Lydia met us in Thailand (because after road tripping through the U.S. and Iceland with them, I obviously can no longer go on a significant trip in my life without them), and home added two more for a couple weeks–a bungalow with mosquito net beds that might as well have been an oven at Railay beach, then a house on Koh Lanta. Next home was wooden planks with a wooden pillow while we spent seven days in silence at a meditation retreat. Then home flew across Asia to a giant overwhelming city in Nepal, then got carried through the Himilayas, getting unpacked and repacked in new towns along the way every day. And then after a couple weeks of hiking home suddenly became a hospital bed.

And then after the hospital stay, it was June 8th which meant the five and a half months were over and it was suddenly time to fly home home. America home. The country I come from home. The place where most of my friends and family are home. The land I longed for when I was so homesick in Australia, or puking my guts out in a squatty potty in the dark on top of a mountain in Nepal, or shitting my insides out in a hospital room, alone.

But home? What did home even mean to me now? Is home a specific place? A state? A town? A certain geography/climate? Where would I live? Where did I feel drawn to?

Is home made by the people that surround you? If so, how could I know where to go to stay when my core tribe people, my family, my soul-mate friends not only extended across the entire US, but now reached into homes and kitchen tables that welcomed me in them and around them on literally the opposite side of the world from the country I am supposed to call home? People that I wouldn’t see for years, if I ever even saw them again. People that would never be able to visit me in America because they would have to spend their life’s savings on a plane ticket to the states. People who have to stay where they were born because there was no other option because somehow I was born with white skin in the most wealthy, privileged country in the world, and they weren’t? How do I sleep at night?

Is home a culture? A tradition? If so, did I even have one? Where did I belong? I used to be rooted in a structured Christian tradition, but then I was uprooted, and I still have yet to find a spiritual soil in which to fully re-plant. Do I try to find a way to make my bed in Christian culture even though I still don’t know what I believe? But what about the fact that a Buddhist meditation retrat was the closest I have felt to God in years? And that still seem to find Jesus more outside of church walls than inside them?

Is home something established that you come alongside and enter into?

Or is home something you make around the table where all of your neighbors are also welcome?

Why was it fair that I could just leave my hospital bed in Nepal to fly back to safety and comfort in America, where healthcare was more quality, where there are giant stores filled with anything you could ever need within a five minute drive at all times, where you can eat mangoes all year because even though they don’t really grow in our country we can fly them in from all around the world all year long, because it’s America. And I happened to be born with white skin inside of its walls, so I could leave my circumstances in Asia and be welcomed back to my country of instant gratification, of the fruits of capitalism and materialism, where anything we could want is at our fingertips constantly. How do I come back to the giant monster of Walmart after walking through tiny, dusty local markets every day, how do I come back to self-driving cars and highways filled with metal boxes zooming 85 miles per hour down concrete slabs that take us anywhere and everywhere after walking everywhere and occasionally being jostled about on public buses crammed to the brim with humans as we drove up and down crazy mountain roads?

I knew I would fly into Atlanta to visit my family for a couple days, and then spend July in Boone crashing with Julia, catching up with her and the rest of my friends in the town that has been a crashing pad on and off for the past five years, but I knew that for some reason Boone was not supposed to be home this year. But if not Boone, then where?

All of these thoughts and feelings plus a million more were like a swarm of honey bees and my head was the hive, but with still having constant diarrhea for two weeks and fighting an intense ear infection that welcomed me to my parents’ house with intense vertigo and nausea, I couldn’t really process them or be present in the transition.

All of my energy went into my body healing. So I came back from almost six months of being on the most beautiful and soul-wrenching and hard and expansive and unexpected and transformative trip,

And then I layed on the couch for five days, with the TV on in the background, not able to think about any of it.

The fact that I was gone, the fact that I was back, the fact that there was a lot I needed to process. I could only think about preparing myself to get up to go to the bathroom when it was time without getting so dizzy and nauseous that I passed out.

And then the day I got better I drove up to Boone, barely even having the chance to tell my parents anything about my trip, much less show them a picture or two, still feeling weird driving on the right side of the road, not knowing how to even prepare myself to suddenly be surrounded by all of my best friends that I hadn’t seen in half a year.

There were lots of hugs, and ‘How was your trip? ‘ was sent my way about a thousand times throughout the summer, and the more I tried to answer it the more I felt isolated and confused. Wait, how do I answer that question in a couple words, or a sentence, or five, or even five thousand? How do I show them that it felt like five and a half years of growth crammed into five and a half months? How do I show them how much it broke me open? How much it healed me on a microscopic level? On a deep level? How do I tell about the tears of gratitude that fell as I finished a 6-day backpacking trip on the Routeburn track that was one of the most beautiful lands I had ever walked through? How do I tell them about the tears of rage that fell from my cheeks as I turned slowly through the pages of The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander, following the history of racial oppression that has been re-born over and over again in the country I come from?How do I tell them about how I learned about radical acceptance with constantly having to learn how to be totally physically uncomfortable, whether it be from a hundred sandfly bites below your knees, or sleeping in a van with three people, or waiting for hours in the sun for your bus that was supposed to come five hours ago, or sitting in meditation for hours and hours when all you want to do is eat a five course meal, or having your body thrown about in a jeep driving down the bumpiest roads you have ever seen like you were a rock in a rock tumbler? How do I tell them about reading Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Kimmerer, aching for a world where we no longer exploit and rip apart for economic gain, whether it be the land that sustains us or the markets we monopolize and take over because we have the biggest stick? How do I tell them about realizing the power in seeking the gift in every single moment, and constantly asking the question, “How is even this my teacher?”

I don’t know how to show anyone where I had been, or how to show them where I felt led to go, because it was too much. Danielle and Lucas, Ben and Lydia, they get it, to an extent, because they were there with me, even though their experience was not exactly the same as mine. And maybe Peter and Julia, or my mom and dad get it a little bit too, because I could carry them through it with me sometimes when wifi connection was good enough and time zones overlapped.

But the answer is not found in the pictures I posted on Instagram. It is not found in the blog posts I attempted but stopped because there was no way to convey, and it is not found in even my attempt at writing this one now.

How was my trip?

The answer to that question is found in the conversations shared. It is found around the table we set up next to the van every night. It is found in the garden with Rob. It is found in the air as I threw the frisbee across an open field to Michaeli from Israel. It is found shivering and cold, caught in the rain. It is sipping whiskey by candle light in the van, alone, on Valentine’s Day. It is found in the sand that made its bed in ours every night no matter how many times we swept it off. It is found playing Kubb with Courtney and Ben on the beach. It is found in the weeds that filled the cracks along the backcountry road on my sunset walks on the farm with the dogs. It is found in baby nugget’s smile with one tooth. It is found in the spring of piano keys under my finger tips after so many months without contact. It is found in the sweet scent of the Eucalyptus trees. It is found in the book of lessons that you learn in solitude. It is found sweating and cussing through Insanity and Ab-Ripper-X with Danielle. It is found in too many cans of tuna. It is found in the dust that became our skin in Laos. It is found in too much Beer Lao when you’re already dehydrated. It is found in the nausea of Bali Belly. It is found on the back of Reza’s motorbike. It is found walking way back in the rice terraces with Ryan. It found crying out for the confidence that your creativity is enough as a writer with Paul. It is found sprinting to catch the game winning point in our last Ultimate Game in Canggu. It is found in what I felt when I walked past a woman and infant begging in Bali while I was about to finally take a bite of my coconut ice cream I was so excited to get, making eye contact as I raised my spoon to my mouth and getting stopped in my tracks with the overwhelming feeling that this is not how the world should be, giving her my ice cream and us smiling softly at each other as if to saying to each other ‘yeah, I don’t know why the world is so fucked up either.” It is found in the weaving of baskets guided by an eighty-year-old Balinese grandma and the offerings and gifts that we fill them with. It is found in the bright green rice fields I biked through with Tia, talking about the struggles of being nine and having an annoying little brother who steals your toys. It is found in steaming breakfasts wrapped in banana leaves. It is found inside the shell of a chilled coconut on a hot afternoon. It is found in feeling the presence of God and letting that be enough, without needing language to capture it. It is found in the feeling when you see a familiar face of a friend in a foreign country that brings the slightest comfort that everything is going to be okay. It is found in the stench that comes from wearing the same clothes over and over again, and in the sore forearm muscles after doing a load of laundry in the sink by hand for the fifteenth time. It is found in the embarrassment you feel when you say “Sawadee-ka” when you meant to say “Kop-khun-ka” and you look like an idiot. It is found in the deep dark of meditation, where light finally breaks through. It is found in the shimmer of the sun as it peaked over the Annapurna Range at 6am after we hiked an hour in the dark. It is found in the comfort of Dal Baht and masala after a hard day of hiking. It is found in the discomfort of Dal Baht in puke form rinsed down a red squatty potty in the dark, while I shivered scared and freezing in the dark, 12,500 feet up in a tiny mountain village. It is found in the friendship of Chloe and Dasi, Paul, Jessie and Gabe. It is found in the teary goodbyes to them, hoping that I might see them again one day, but knowing it was most likely that it wouldn’t happen. It is found in the dents my knees made in the dirt when I couldn’t do anything but kneel in gratitude. It is found in the growth. It is found in the grief. It is found in the receiving. It is found in the giving away. It is found in all the laughs bellowed, it is found in all the tears wept.

But these are just words, and I ache staring at the gap that is left between them and the reality of how they moved me on the inside. I wish I could show you. I wish I could answer that question and you actually be able to fully understand how my trip was. But language is completely inadequate. As it is in most things that break us open and change us–love, transformation, grief, healing, the Divine. 

So, it has been hard. Reverse-culture shock really is a thing. And with my hospital bills and unexpected travel expenses being more than I thought, my financial cushion I was supposed to come back with had been depleted, which led to me immediately taking a job working long hours under a chef at a high-class high-stress kitchen for the rest of the summer, where I felt like the soul high I had while I was gone was very quickly eradicated and I was feeling inauthentic and disconnected to myself just within weeks of being back in the States. I was eating food that was terrible for me just because it was there, I wasn’t exercising because I was still fighting health stuff that left me low-energy, I wasn’t spending time with my friends like I thought I would because I was just working a lot, which all added to the confusion of not knowing how to be, how to live, especially how to do that now that I’m back. America sucked me back in real quick. 

So I didn’t know how to show people where I had been. I felt isolated and confused. I had intense feelings of the unfairness of how my life as a white American is allowed to be so easy and comfortable compared to most people in the world just because of the circumstances I was born into. I was very quickly working a job that made me feel inauthentic to myself but still was totally taken care of financially right away, when so many people search for jobs for months.

And in the midst of it all I had three weeks before it would be time to make a decision on where to move and stay for a while, where to live and unpack without having to re-pack my things a day or two later, and actually sign a lease, something that felt totally foreign after almost two years of being “homeless.”

Where is home? I don’t know. I can’t stay in Boone, but North Carolina makes sense. So it looks like Asheville and Durham are the two options for this year……..and…….

I felt the nudge. So I followed it. Within a week I had a lease and a job lined up in Durham, North Carolina. And I had peace. So I said yes. Because for the past three years the nudges have been trustworthy, and they have led me to where I needed to go, so why would this year be any different?

So I moved. Yes. Moved. My stuff. Out of storage. Into an apartment. Into a bedroom. That is “mine,” for the time being, according to this foreign piece of paper called a rental lease.

Until last week, in the past 20 months I hadn’t slept in the same town for more than seven consecutive nights.

Let me put it another way. It has been almost two years since I have stayed in a place for more than a week straight.

Living out of a bag has become the only life I know, and I have forgotten what it is like for things to have a place. I was always packing, always losing my toothbrush, always re-organizing, always waiting to leave to the next place. It was fun and exciting for a while, but it eventually became nothing but exhausting. 

I have a bed that belongs to me, since I have a room to come home to every night. The walls are filled with my art pieces and pictures that have my face in them. There is more space than a backpack or car trunk, so I get to enjoy things like having a keyboard and my bookshelf again. Tonight I sleep in a bed that will be mine for more than 7 nights in a row. I signed a piece of paper that says this room is mine to call home until the end of May 2019, and though that is only nine months from now, it feels like an eternity after so many months of floating, of not having a place, of having to figure out how to carry home inside of me. Home will remain in the same state, the same town, the same apartment, the same room, and it feels completely foreign and I don’t know what to do with myself most days. I come come from work and try to sit in my room and relax, but my inclination is to leave, to find something outside to do, or go write at a coffee shop, because I have become so used to not having a space of my own and having to find it in the woods or in a public setting. 

I’m really good at packing up and leaving. But staying? Staying is something I haven’t done for a while, and sometimes I worry if I’ll ever be able to commit to a place, if the dreams I have of living in one community for years and letting my roots grow deep and really intertwine with those around me will ever become reality. I don’t know what it is like to live somewhere without there being a pre-determined move-out date, and maybe I’ll find out one day. But for now I’m staying put for 9 months, which is significant after my transitory past couple of years. I’m in a place that I know will only be a short-term community, and then I will leave again, probably back to Western North Carolina somewhere, but there is no way to know.

I got back to the states and was pretty silent–took a break from social media. I stopped posting, not because I didn’t have anything to say, but because I had so much to say that it was paralyzing, and I didn’t know where to start. And honestly I still don’t really know where to start, but not saying anything is not the answer.

So, what am I doing in Durham? I am nannying full time for a family of four with 3-year old and 6-yera old boys, which has been slightly less stressful than parenting nine children at once. So that’s what is paying the bills. I’ve started to get to know the woods here, through lots of trail running and foraging for mushrooms (a new hobby I am learning about). I’m slowly learning road names, and biking around town has helped. I’ve perfected a new recipe in a real kitchen–vegetarian sweet potato enchiladas that are actually orgasmic, and I’ve done laundry two times in the past two weeks which feels excessive but I guess is somewhat normal?

But my priority in coming back to the states is figuring out how to get the book I’ve been working on writing the past couple years in final manuscript form so that I can move forward in the process of publishing it. So a lot of my time these days is spent pretty equally between being filled with excitement because my book is going to be everything I dreamed of or being filled with dread because I’m the worst writer ever and no one is ever going to want to read this. Pretty normal days in the life of a writer, or the life of any creative. Why are we so cruel to ourselves? I guess we doubt ourselves most when we pursue the things we are most passionate about, because it is the most vulnerable state we can put ourselves in. It hurts to open ourselves up to the world, and rejection is scary. So it’s easier to tell ourselves that what we have to say is actually not worth saying. But that my friends, is the scariest lie of all. We must bear the gifts that have been placed inside of us, no matter how soul-wrenching that is, and it is time to do the work.

The transition back to “normal” life (whatever that means) has been hard and messy and confusing and I’ve been crying a lot. But I know I need to make space for that. There are days when I fully believe in myself as a writer, and days when there is so much self-doubt to push through I lose the strength to even open my laptop. There are days when I feel completely in love with Durham, and there are days when I ask myself what the hell I was thinking.

Everything is up in the air. But isn’t it always?

Do your work. 

Then step back.

Express yourself completely.

Then keep quiet. 

These two proverbs from the Tao have become rocks I tether myself to when I show up to my creativity. Answering the call is all I can do to keep showing up to the insanity that is existence.

.      .      .

So home? I don’t know where it is. But I hope I will know when I find it.

Will my book be terrible? Maybe. But the gift is found in the process of writing it and having the courage to share it.

Have I figured out what it looks like to live a sustainable and ethical life as a white American with privilege without living in cognitive dissonance and taking part in reinforcing an oppressive system? Nope, but my heart is aching for it.

Am I completely fulfilled and happy and thriving? Not always. And that’s how it’s supposed to be—Life, in the real and raw, stumbling our way through uncertainty and the potential for rejection and heartbreak and failure. But we must keep on showing up. And we must keep on loving ourselves through it all.

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Cheers to the Journey, and may your Spirit always reside in a state of wonder.