Making Myself at Home
I didn’t cry until I started taking my couch apart. I’ve rarely been sentimental about leaving a house, but there was something profound about stuffing everything I owned into a storage locker so that I could travel around the world.
I was about to trade in the comforts of home to spend a full year working and living around the world with Remote Year, visiting 12 cities in 12 months with 52 people I had never met, while exploring a whole new concept of what “home” could mean. Also, I pinched my index finger in the metal plate that connected the two halves of the couch together and I had hardly eaten all day, and it was suddenly all too much to bear.
Merriam-Webster defines home as “one’s place of residence” or “house.” I have lived in no fewer than 20 different spaces that I called home. The first few, of course, involved my parents. Subsequent domiciles involved roommates or romantic partners. Occasionally, including this last place, they were just mine. As I pondered how it would feel to live out of a suitcase for a year, it occurred to me that I have no idea where my home actually is.
In a 2015 article in Psychology Today, Frank T. McAndrew describes home as “the place where you feel in control and properly oriented in space and time; it is a predictable and secure place.” This seems logical, but it doesn’t work for me. No matter the furniture, I have always had a conflicted relationship with the places I have lived. Mostly, I just wasn’t fully comfortable in any of them — some were too loud, some were too small, others were too shabby or too dark or just too far away from somewhere better. After I dislodged my finger from my semi-dismantled couch, I finally had to admit — 20-something places of residence later — that my problem wasn’t with home. My problem was with me. I became alarmed that my problem with home was a surrogate for not being comfortable with myself.
If I’m not comfortable with myself, then leaving my possessions in a storage locker and climbing on a plane isn’t going to solve my problem. Maybe that’s why I started to cry when I took apart the couch: I was also disassembling my life and I had no reassembly instructions. The Remote Year on-boarding process addresses this issue head-on: traveling for a year doesn’t make your home problems go away. Your problems travel with you and, in fact, you gain a bunch of new (but hopefully better) ones. So it begs the question: what do I want to get out of this year of travel?
That’s quite different than the question most people ask, which is, “What made you decide to do it?” That is easy to answer: because I can. I love to travel and my freelance life gives me the flexibility to work from anywhere. But making the most of 12 months away means going deeper than my Instagram feed and asking how I will measure the success of my year when I’m done, beyond just having done it.
When I committed my down payment for this adventure four months ago, if you had asked me what I wanted from my Remote Year experience, I would have said something vague about expanding my horizons and learning to better understand what makes the world tick. But as I took the cushions off the chaise and discovered a thick layer of dust peppered with fragments of Pringles, I realized I was crying because real success will mean learning what makes me tick — a process that’s bound to be messy if I’ve made it this far in life without figuring it out. And I might not like the answers.
Alas, it was too late to change my mind. I had agreed to rent my house to strangers who will, at least for a little while, make it their home. My grey, faux-suede sectional — which made me happier than any other piece of furniture I have ever owned — had to give way for other people’s things. I had also paid for a one-way plane ticket to a destination nearly 9,000 kilometres away, and a non-refundable reservation to spend a year of my life traveling with a group of humans who committed to doing exactly the same thing.
Pico Iyer’s 2015 TED Talk gave me some hope. “It’s only by stepping out of your life and into the world that you can see what you most deeply care about and find a home.”
So I packed the cushions in an oversized box and I let myself cry. Ready or not, my physical home for the next year will be transient. Hopefully the messiness will be too.
First stop: Buenos Aires, Argentina.
My January home: Buenos Aires, Argentina
This post was first published on Medium.com/@kaarina on January 26, 2018, shortly after I started my Remote Year travels. Steemit will become my first publishing platform for new posts once I have you all caught up.