on building a home

I used to think home was the pit in my stomach. It was hot breath and droplets of black licorice spit on my face. It was the guilt of taking up too much space, worrying about the parts that spilled over the edge until I was sick. That was home. There was love there too, sure, but it had to be earned or bought. Honor roll and medals and handshakes with stiff men in starched uniforms were my currency. Some would say that isn’t love. I would, but I’d also say I’m a bad judge. 

The truth is, when you’re always looking at yourself, watering down parts here and pruning thorns there, you start to forget what it feels like to live inside your own body. I still find myself counting to five and pinching myself in grocery store lines to remind myself that the two feet I see on the ground belong to me. I take breaths until I find one deep enough, one that makes my lungs swell until they hurt because it makes me feel bigger than the tiniest versions of myself I squeezed my body into. This is the price I paid to be unassuming, to assume the shape of someone who deserved their home. 

I was adopted when I was eight months old — too young to remember where I came from, but old enough for my bones to remember they were calcified somewhere far away. They ache every time I’m reminded of that fact: when the only eyes in my family that matched mine belonged to my dog, or when that dog died and the funeral was thrown without me. You can’t unlearn the feeling of not belonging. People laugh with you and smile at you and they might even mean it, but that feeling is always whispering in your ear: don’t talk back. Uncross your legs. Speak like they do. I guess it’s a survival instinct, but when I was younger, growing up with a family I didn’t feel a part of, I always wondered what I could be if I was doing more than surviving. 

It wasn’t until about a month ago, during a visit to my childhood house, that I started to feel like I knew the answer. As I got to the neighborhood, I played my music too loud and drove too fast, just like I had when I was s16. The streets and houses that felt too close together in those days — the ones that would wring the air from my chest and tell me I would never escape – now seemed to open up and give me room to breathe as they sped past. I’m 21 now. I realized as I drove that somewhere between surviving and this moment, I had grown up a little. There is pleasure in realizing you don’t belong somewhere and showing up anyway. Or, at least, in deciding that you’re done being burned by the same place. Not that I can take all the credit — I owe my growth to a very different kind of family.

As alone as I’ve felt all my life, it’s never been out-and-out. Few people have the luck to meet even one person they can call a best friend; I’ve been lucky more times than I can count. Whenever I need someone most, I find that they're already holding my hand. Friends who are brave when I can’t be, who are giving even when they have nothing themselves, and who taught me that family has nothing to do with blood and everything to do with showing up. My best friend always says that your soulmate is the one who stays, and I know she’s right because the people who love me most are never more than a phone call away. 

Each of these people taught me something that’s laced into the fabric of who I am now, a tapestry I’ve been weaving since my first best friend died. 

Because love felt conditional for so long when I was young, I was careful about who I gave mine to. I knew what would push people away. When they got too close, I used their vulnerability against them. I’m not proud of it, but it was all I knew. I told secrets I had vowed to keep and I laughed at their keepers’ expense as I did it. I figured everyone had an ulterior motive, and if I could stifle them before they had a chance to reveal themselves fair weathered, I wouldn’t have to stick around and find out what it was they really wanted from me. Every person who was turned off by my behavior was just another paper in the “I told you so” stack — mounting evidence in the case I was building against myself. 

It wasn’t until middle school, when I met the first person I could call a best friend, that I learned it was because I was loved badly that I loved so badly in return. She knew the terrain well, and she told me all the terrible things that had happened to her. But she had forgiven those people — truly, genuinely forgiven — and she wanted the same for me. I’ll admit, I wasn’t ready to hear about forgiveness. I wanted people to know how badly they had hurt me, and I wanted to protect myself from getting hurt again. But, of course, that’s not how love works. 

She told me that I’d get tired of being angry. Tired of being alone and holding myself when someone else’s arms would be so much warmer, and for a while, she was that person. I finally had someone who felt like home. She was the first family I had that woke up every day and made the choice to act like family. I imagined her as infallible, a preacher of some grand philosophy of love where anyone could heal from anything and anyone, no matter if they deserved it or not, could be forgiven. I had to believe this, but in doing so, I missed the trembles in her fingers and the cracks in her voice the last time she called me, when she told me how much she loved me and how proud of me she was. 

I took the news of her death hard. I was resentful that she left me, and I saw it as another failure on my part, that I didn’t love her enough or take good enough care of her to make her stay. I see now that no matter how much love she could give to others, and to me, there just wasn’t enough love left for herself. But the pain of losing her, of finding out that her promises to never leave me behind were hollow, did not lend itself to enough generosity to see that. In my guilt and my anger, she became the hardest person of all to forgive. I kept myself closed off, and I grew even more afraid of letting people cradle any of my vulnerability. 

I became obsessed with the idea of having a best friend. I was desperate for the feeling of being anchored, of knowing that there was someone who loved me above everyone else. Someone who would choose me every time in a room full of people. It became like a game to me. I came out as gay in early high school and I found that plenty of people were willing to tote me around as an accessory, so I let them. I knew just how much of myself to give away to make them feel close to me without really opening my heart to any danger. And they would feel seen enough, supported enough, fabulous enough to crown me their best friend. I would walk into a room to smiles and hugs from everyone in it, and that satisfied me enough to curb the gnawing at my insides — the fear that no one would love the real me, and the intense loneliness that accompanied that truth. 

I played this game throughout high school, and I got so good at it that I figured I could get by forever this way, cycling through people who were enamored with me until I inevitably pushed them away and found someone new. Luckily for me, I was dead wrong. Within a week of starting college, I learned that the same old tricks would do me no good. It wasn’t a popularity contest anymore, and nobody thought I was special. The character I was playing sounded flat against conversations with people who really cared about getting to know me. No one was looking for a token gay friend, and nobody had time for a best friend just for the sake of saying they had one. Nobody wants a facade when they’re looking for a home.

It’s for this reason that college has been the best years of my life. Left with no option but to let people in, I slowly started to make real friends. My first best friend had been a lot like a first love — it was exciting and it felt irreplaceably real because it was the first time I’d experienced the feeling of being chosen. She was the first person who knew what I was thinking just by looking at me, and I assumed for a long time that if a friendship didn’t lead with that kind of spark and instant connection, it wasn’t meant to be. It’s liberating to realize that’s not true. I now have the best friends I’ve ever had, and we know each other like the backs of our hands, but it took time to get there. I had to learn to show up for them, to put aside my fear that they were going to bolt so that I could teach myself to not run away first. 

I still feel that pit in my stomach. I still worry that I won’t be sparkly enough to make friends, and I still worry that if I don’t monitor myself, I’ll reveal myself to be someone who doesn’t deserve a home. I still feel myself returning to survival mode whenever I walk through the front door of my house. But I have a new family now that makes promises and keeps them, people who forgive me when I make mistakes and whom I forgive right back. They were there when I put on makeup for the first time. When people laughed behind my back at the club, they were standing up for me before I even knew what was happening. They were there when the first boy I fell in love with broke up with me, and they were there when he did it again, even though they hated that I gave him a second chance. They even bought me the first flowers I’d ever been given. 

Driving into my neighborhood a few short weeks ago, I had a smile on my face. Not because I’d successfully fended off the memories that descend every time I return to the place I grew up, but because the song I was playing in my car was the very same that played at the dining room table of my best friend’s house the night before. I smiled because I had perspective. I could look backwards at all the sad things without feeling engulfed by them — they were all stories I had shared with my chosen family, stories that I didn’t have to carry by myself anymore. 

A home isn’t just a place you stay for a little while with the intention of leaving it behind, and it’s not somewhere that doesn’t love you back. A home is somewhere you can return to after you try things out and fuck them up. It’s a place where you go to have your heart refilled. It’s a place that you know will always be open to you, no matter where it is. The family I’ve found made me believe I was someone who deserved a place like this, and I wouldn’t trade them for the world.