Growing Homes
Illustration by Delaney.
Like plants’ need for water and warmth, human beings need love, security and safety to grow. However, unlike plants, human beings don’t really die or stop growing once these basic emotional needs aren’t met, they go on living. What happens is that their qualities, beliefs, their most basic sense of security, and everything else that comprises their identity all build on a flimsy and easily breakable base.
When we’re young, identity largely depends on our home environment. It’s the time when we learn to form our identity and create its place in the world. In other words, it’s home that we base our identities on, or at least, that’s how it feels to me. When I think about my early environment, and home in general, it’s impossible not to become aware of how similar I am to it. I find the unsteadiness of its air in my beliefs and thinking process, the seeds of shame planted in its every room in my habits of feeling, and even its external, tired appearance resembles my own.
Home, in a way, has its own identity. When I smell a lavender-scented candle I am reminded of the atmosphere of my friend’s room, or when I smell oud-scented bukhoor I remember the energy of my aunt’s house on Eid mornings. But the identity and aura of a home are also reflected in its emotional comfort level, its residents’ connections with one another, and the type of love they grew up giving and receiving.
The aura of my home was filled with inescapable tensions, and on some level, I’ve adopted certain unpleasant behaviors from my environment to survive them. Despite growing up emotionally separated from my surroundings, I still grew into my home’s likeness. It makes me think about whether we’re really ever independent from home, or whether we’ll always be pieces of this world that was the first to ever hold us within its arms when we were born?
Because home is the first place one comes to know, it’s a whole world or even a universe of its own in a child’s eyes. It’s hard for a child to healthily form their identity when they don’t feel secure or safe to exist in the first world they become a part of. When they grow up afraid to being themselves, their identity will always lack a secure place from which to operate. Identity might be an accumulation of qualities, beliefs and experiences, but it doesn’t necessarily depend on these aspects alone. It’s the sense of security that develops in early childhood that allows identity to bloom into its natural and healthy shape, and builds its overall sense of stability. With security being absent from my life, a feeling akin to being baseless with no grounding center has always accompanied me.
If I were to write about home, I would say it was the place where I learned to abandon who I am because that sense of stability to be myself wasn’t there. I couldn’t describe my childhood well if I wanted to; it feels like it passed by a haze of confusion because I was constantly avoiding it. It has always made me feel lost growing up, constantly asking myself: who am I?
I like to think that maybe building that sense of foundational emotional security does not depend on home––that it isn’t its original birthplace. It’s in moments where I feel like I am my most authentic and care-free self, which I thought was damaged in childhood, that I realize it’s probably not far-fetched or too late to connect once again to myself.
Everyone deserves a home in which they can freely express their identity, and when neglect, rejection and outside sources interfere––one can create their own home. It begins when one realizes their self-worth is innate, and that they deserve to find themselves and have the power to do so. When I create a space for me to be comfortable in, I feel at home. Home becomes an internal experience of being grounded and connected to myself, my beliefs, and my values. Home no longer refers to a past––it is a present that I’ll always have the power to create.
Healing occurs when the surrounding environment allows for authentic and uncensored expression, and when there are constant moments of feeling at ease in oneself. The journey of finding one’s authentic self when that authentic self wasn’t allowed to exist before is a tricky process, but not an impossible one. As long as someone holds space in this world, their authenticity has a place in it and they can always find their way back to themselves.