Home: A Place or a Feeling?

What is Home, Anyway?

Me and Dad circa 1987/88

***

Today’s essay is part of a series on home that includes 

Joshua Doležal

, 

Bowen Dwelle

, 

Michael Mohr's Sincere American Writing

, 

Dee Rambeau

,

Latham Turner

and 

Lyle McKeany

. In the past we’ve written about trust, fatherhood, recovery, and work. We continue to explore our lives through these collaborations.This week, all of us wrestle with what home means to us. Please let us know how our meditations on home compare to your own.

***

Growing up in Ojai, California, 90 miles northeast of Los Angeles, I always felt pulled between the tension of my detached, mellow father on one hand and my intense, strict (and warm yet sometimes very controlling) mother on the other.

Both parents loved me dearly; there’s zero question about that. And I was beyond provided for, particularly in a material way.

Yet I did feel sort of alien, in my body, in my mind, and in my home environment. I don’t exactly know why. I recall that feeling from a very young age. Fear, shame, guilt, insecurity and deep wonder and curiosity boiled within me from more or less day one. My home environment felt a little too structured, a little too superficial, a little too conventional, a little too Leave it to Beaver. It didn’t strike me as authentic or believable but came off almost more like a theatrical stage set. What did feel like home was being alone, pulling dusty old classic tomes from my mother’s shelves and trying to understand the sentences, engaging with my own rich inner imagination. Later this became surfing, BMX, punk rock, alcohol, and trouble generally.

I think I got caught somehow between my father’s codependent lack of authority and my mother’s fierce determination to prove to herself that she wasn’t her own mother. (Long story.) Either way, I managed to somehow fall through the cracks, through the thin crevices between these two adults who were my first human consciousness of the world.

There are a lot of good, warm, earthy memories from childhood. Playing in the cul-de-sac with my friends in Ventura, where I was born, in the late 1980s. Riding a bike for my first time in that same cul-de-sac. Hot-Wheels. Learning to draw with Robby, the nice man my family knew down the block. Running around the barranca with my best friend Clay, pretending to be chased by wild boar (his dad was a hunter). Swimming in Clay’s backyard outdoor pool. Picking wild raspberries and, after cleaning them, eating them with a bowl of sugar to dip them into. (I can still taste that raspberry and sugar on my tongue.) Going on trips as a boy with my mom to Solvang, just the two of us. Sitting in the boiling jacuzzi in the backyard in Ojai gazing up at the stars with my father, asking him endlessly about space.

And there were the harder moments too but I’ve listed them plenty in previous posts. Point is: I felt magically adrift, out-of-body, alien, deserted, abandoned, confused. Perhaps it was just my “factory settings” from birth. I had a mix of my lonely, isolated, work-obsessed and incredibly intelligent, warm and kind father, with my imaginative, creative, smart, driven, controlling mother. Plus my own weird little intrinsic self. Whatever it was, my self-awareness and self-consciousness were very high from a really young age. I felt too sensitive for the world. The world—out there—seemed diabolical. I needed something to take the edge off.

Enter alcohol and drugs.

*

I left my parents’ home at 19, around 2003. I’d barely survived high school and was lucky to have gotten my diploma, despite having been expelled three weeks prior to senior graduation. (Read my novel, The Crew, for the whole story here.) Thus began my years of Kerouacian wayward lostness: Drinking constantly, partying, moving every few months to another neighborhood or city entirely, fighting, fucking and thumbing my way across America and back myriad times. In 2008 alone I moved five times, all in the same area in San Francisco (Ocean Beach); I blamed this on shitty roommates but the reality was I was a drunk. I was the problem.

The story of my life pre-sobriety (2010) is the story of anger, confusion, alcoholism and movement. If there was ever a sense of home it was in the stories I wrote, the poetry I dashed off, the novels I tried to write, the literature I read, the booze I consumed, women I dated, the literal and figurative roads I hitchhiked along and the dreams I dreamed.

But it all came crashing down on September 24^th, 2010, the day I got sober. I realized at that point that I’d been running all my life. I hadn’t been moving all those times because I wanted a new room, a new space, a new location; I’d moved because I was a disaster and I couldn’t figure my life out; I couldn’t cope with the spiritual pain I was in; I didn’t know how to extricate myself from the suffering I was indeed (I now know) inflicting on myself. I blamed everybody in my life back then…except for myself. Ownership—taking responsibility—was #1.

*

Post-sobriety things were decidedly different, but not easy. I was still an alcoholic I just wasn’t drinking. Only now I didn’t have anything to dull the throbbing pain in my brain when shame, guilt or self-hate settled on top of my mind like melting metal. Instead, I had to wear that metal like a helmet. I had to, for the first time in adulthood, actually feel this shit. And it was rough. There’s nothing like taking a drunk’s medicine away and making them taste the real world. It ain’t pretty. But, slowly over time, I adjusted. I got used to it. I found helpful tricks, tools and techniques. I began to understand the world, how it worked, how it felt, how it hurt.

I lived in Portland for eight months from September 2010 to June, 2011. Then I went back to the Bay Area and found a little illegal former-garage-turned-studio apartment on Alcatraz Ave in trendy North Oakland for—are you ready for this—$795/mo, all utilities included. This was 2011. If that unit still exists he must be renting it for easily $2,500/mo, if not more. Ah, the halcyon days. I lived in this apartment until 2015, almost four years. After that I moved with my ex into a house I bought in El Cerrito, north of Berkeley. I lived there from 2015 to 2019 (we broke up in 2018) at which time I left everything behind, rented the house out and moved to Manhattan. One year before Covid. Yep.

I had the glory of 2019 in NYC and then everything crumbled like old wood from acid when the pandemic hit the city in March, 2020. I was living in East Harlem; it was as rough as you imagine. I eventually broke my lease later that year and found a small shotgun walkup in Lenox Hill on East 70^th between 1^st and York. Much better.

Thinking I was finally getting used to New York, after a couple years, my father got diagnosed with terminal cancer, so I left the city and moved to Santa Barbara where they’d moved (from Ojai) mid-pandemic. I lived with them for the first time in 20 years, for three months, and then found a nearby apartment. I was there one year before moving in with Britney, into her house in Lompoc, the small agricultural town I’d never heard of 50 minutes north of Santa Barbara along Pacific Coast Highway and Highway 246. We lived there, in her house, for a year and eight months. Then, just over a week ago, we moved to Portland. In 5-6 months we plan to move to Spain.

You get the idea. At some point we plan to settle down and grasp at some sort of roots. It’ll happen eventually.

My point is: I’ve never had that settled experience, except in childhood. I was born in Ventura. At eight—in 1991—we moved to Ojai, where I lived until I left home just over a decade later. It was in Ojai that all the big internal and external changes started. Not long after I left home my parents used the money they inherited from my paternal father’s death and built their own home in a different part of Ojai. They moved into that house in 2005. I got to know that house well over the years but I never lived in it.

So it begs the question: What, exactly, is home?

The honest answer, for me, is I don’t know. Looking more deeply, I don’t think I’ve ever thought of “home” as a physical place. There may have been times when I felt like X or Y place had a warm, homey feeling…but I can’t recall ever feeling like I specifically “had a home.” Not that my folks’ homes weren’t a form of home; those homes, in some ways, always felt more like home than anywhere else. And yet, I also often felt misunderstood by my parents, and my family at large, and I often felt like I couldn’t fully be my true self around them. Because my true self meant intensity, meant interrogation, meant depth and emotion and getting real. This, more or less, has usually been verboten in my family. With my mom, yes, but even there she has walls which you reach fairly quickly. (Usually things about myself and my past which she does not care to venture into.)

*(This brings up, for myself, the notion of potential boundaries and emotional neediness and familial expectations. I know I struggle often with all of this.)

*

Now, home, or the thing closest to describing it, is engendered by my wife Britney and our three cats. Our little family. Reading a book next to Britney before bed is one of my life’s true, genuine joys now. Wherever I go, knowing I have them there with me gives me that feeling that alcohol once gave me; a sort of weird, inexplicable warmth and heart-palpitation which makes me relax and feel safe. It’s much easier nowadays, at 41 and sober 14 years, to be myself. For one thing, I now know who I actually am. That search, while never officially “over,” has been more or less resolved. Ditto the Relationship Quagmire; for so many dismal years I wasted time and money on the nefarious, exhausting dating apps, or else slept with random women I didn’t know or care about. I was reflecting the emptiness I felt inside onto the pallid outside. I was encased in a void of black fear. I was, truly, unable to love, myself or anyone else.

That has all changed. Not that I’m anywhere near perfect. (Ask my wife.) I am a very complex, wounded man. Not broken; I’m not saying that. There’s a lot of good in my character, a lot of promise in me as a man. But certainly my flaws are obvious and many. But that’s okay. We’re all works in progress, are we not? I think from a very young age I felt out of place, lonely, excluded, different. (Typical sensitive writer.)

I didn’t have a tribe or an ideology or any serious belief system. I copied and pasted other people’s lives onto my own, then quickly rejected those same lives out of hand because it never felt like “me,” even if I didn’t know precisely what “me” even meant. I see now this was my search for home. Inner home, behavioral home, spiritual home, literary home.

It takes time for most of us to find ourselves, for us to locate our own passions within the maelstrom that is life. Things get turbulent, get upside down, get backwards, and the easier thing, for me, has always been to run. In some ways I’m still doing that. But I don’t get far. I don’t have to travel to a psychological Sub Saharan Africa in order to feel alive or loved or safe. I can look at myself squarely in the mirror now, say I love you, and feel home.