Home

For a long time, the word “home” felt strange to me. At 18, I left the Chicago home I knew to go to college and my idea of home has constantly shifted ever since. Home became a dorm room I shared with a girl I found on Facebook. At 19, home was a bedroom at my aunt and uncle’s house in Nashville. At 20, I moved to Spain for 5 months and home became a tiny room in the apartment of a sweet Spanish family that chose to host a girl from the United States. When I came back to the states, I moved into a house in Nashville that became my home until I graduated college at the age of 22. At 23, I live in a house in East Nashville that I get to call my home. Through all of it, I usually told people I was going “home for the holidays.” This usually meant I would be spending holidays at my parents house in Chicago or my brother’s house in Arizona. I remember asking people I knew if I could still call Chicago home even if I live and work in Nashville. The responses were mixed but here is the conclusion I have come to: 

I am learning that home is not one place for me and that it is a blessing to be able to call so many places home when there are people that struggle to name just one. I have always heard that “home is where the heart is” but I don’t believe that to be true. I believe that we leave pieces of our hearts with the people and places we see and spend time with. I am choosing to believe that home is wherever those pieces of our hearts are. I am grateful for all of the people and places that hold pieces of my heart and which I call home. The idea that we get to live life, spreading pieces of our hearts around, and creating homes for ourselves makes life that much more exciting and beautiful. Leaving one place does not mean losing a home but rather adding to a list of people and places we can always return home to.