Still dandelioning

Sometimes, I’ll write something but the words aren’t mine. They feel sincere, yet I know they’re not coming from my direct experience. The most reasonable explanation I found for these feelings and thoughts is that they’re inherited. Channeled. Maybe from my parents or their parents. We inherit so much more than money, assets, and status that goes unnoticed — not invisible. They leave an imprint on the way we behave, the choices that we make, how far we allow our imaginations to stretch. I’ve written about this before, and I keep returning to this collection of thought. Maybe that’s inherited too.

I often say that I don’t feel native anywhere. I don’t understand the uncomplicated feeling of belonging to one specific country or place. Home isn’t about blood, soil, and citizenships for me, but I also know that “everywhere can be home” is a self-soothing story rather than lived freedom. I was never made to be a wanderer. I always longed for a home that stays, and the dream of finding that home is what kept me wandering.

I moved nearly every single year between 2012 and 2020 from one apartment to another, across a few cities in one country. I was very good at it. The moving and living from a few suitcases. Every time I moved, I would go through an emotional upheaval, but I would also convince myself that I needed to leave when the time was ripe.

A nomadic life looks romantic from the outside, until you realize that your sense of home is scattered everywhere. “I carry home with me,” you tell yourself. But here’s a thought to disrupt this story: maybe you’re avoiding the reality that at the root of “everywhere can be home” is a deep longing for stability that you don’t feel you deserve because instability is the safety you’ve always known — the crumbs you were fed.

Maybe, “everywhere can be home” is a mental reframe of “nowhere feels like home”. A clever way your mind tries to protect you from an ache it knows too well — an ache that you may have inherited but never felt.

It wasn’t until I helped my dad move — once again — that I really saw this pattern for what it is. He can’t stay in one place for long, always finding something not quite right. The apartment is too high up. The noise outside is too loud. There’s not enough storage space. I could see the effect of history on him and through him, its effect on me.

I inherited this restlessness, a hypervigilance that mistakes settling for being trapped. It’s a need to break free that somehow keeps choosing situations that feel restraining. As if I need the constraints to justify the leaving. Like everyone else, I have the need for both freedom and stability, but somehow acutely amplified.

We’re trying to protect ourselves from the pain of losing something. Safety, maybe even identity. I am a daughter of immigrants, a descendant of diaspora. Somewhere in our lineage, my ancestors survived because they stayed ready to move. Through the constant moving, instability became safety itself, rootlessness the only home they could trust. I don’t have evidence of this, yet I feel it in my irrational fears and reactions. Why else would it feel existentially threatening to move and equally uncomfortable to stay?

The last time I wrote about home, I was getting ready to leave a place I poured a lot of energy into. Now I’m sitting on the same moss green couch, but this time, in an apartment with a permanent contract. I am happy at this new place, very happy. And still, I felt that itch for change again, creeping up in the quietude of stability when everything felt too steady. Too good.

You know how you’re not supposed to scratch mosquito bites because they’ll spread? I caught myself scratching the itch by cataloging problems. The area is too boring. The kitchen counter is too small. I don’t like the ceiling height. And then the itch would expand into questioning the city altogether: What am I doing here? What’s tying me to this specific city?

There are many writers I keep returning to, but Nix’s words often make me feel seen and infuse me with a sense of belonging like no other:

When you belong nowhere, many places can be home-shaped, or you can feel like a wanderer for longer than is comfortable: listless and drifting. Yet belonging nowhere means you get to choose your loyalties and your beliefs. You choose the stake to bear, the price you’ll pay. These decisions end up being consequential. To make them is to sharpen and ossify the wavering lines of fate and direction.

Before Berlin, I was severely listless and drifting. I tell people that intuition is what guided me here — the city of transformation, I’ve been calling it. I say that it’s something that can’t be put into words, but I’m realizing that it may just have been a readiness felt as existential fatigue. I was tired of performing, of not feeling at home anywhere. I came here ready to unravel, even if I didn’t know it intellectually at the time. Even if I resisted it for while.

This city has held me in ways I’ve never experienced. Our chemistry has stripped away everything misaligned. It’s helped me cultivate my connection to my intuition, feelings, desires, fears, and everything else that I had learned to suppress in service of others and survival in the external world. I have felt naked. Literally and spiritually. This is where I’ve learned that true belonging can’t be retrieved from the outside. Until you feel at home within and trust that it won’t be lost, you will always ache for a home to be found everywhere you are not.

Midnight Pond has been an important part of this journey. I keep returning to the art of words, just as I return to the park near where I live. I’m realizing that rooting is simply a constant returning — to the self, the place, the practice, the people — until both distance and proximity serve commitment and returning feels like an instinctive need rather than a search for something lost.

You know how they tell you to put X’s on mosquito bites with your nail for relief instead of scratching them? Writing about home does this for me. I don’t know if I’m breaking the pattern or just getting better at describing it, but maybe this is how you break the pattern. Just like expressing yourself brings clarity to who you are.

This year, I’m still staying without tying it to forever. Still dandelioning.