Dreaming Home

I think I’ve been searching for home since the day I was born. With the exception of graduate school, I’ve never quite felt like I belonged anywhere. It's as though I’ve had to live in others’ worlds for much of my life: The world most people inhabit, the world that can be seen and touched and proven. The one I’m more comfortable within, though, is that of things invisible: Shadows and depth, inner experience, spiritual dimensions, and beauty, for example. Yet, like most of the world, I too dismiss or minimize this attunement, thereby denying my innermost reality all on my own. A survival mechanism I suppose, constructed to protect me from the potential humiliation of stepping into my dreams and desires only to be rejected or made to feel foolish. I developed a staunch practicality as a result of this fear, which has helped me to navigate the external world even as it has simultaneously squashed the dreamer in me.

Connecting with the dreamer within feels dangerous, exposing me to the pain of humiliation, disappointment, and jugement of myself as selfish, as well as regret over a life chosen from a place that ignored the dreamer... a place that wasn’t entirely me. Yet I know that it is from this place that I wish to create this next, literal version of home. And so I promise myself that I'll not give up the dreams completely. I promise that I will incorporate elements of that less-visible-dimension into my present life & new home. I promise to play a part in this process of creating home from a place rooted in all of me.