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To build a home, you must first realize that home is within you.

I’ve been all around the world and back again a few different times.

Each time, I went out in search of a home. A place to find belonging. To be able to call my own. To feel that familiar sense of peace.

Sometimes I got close to finding all of that in the places I ended up.

I would wake up in the mornings with the sun streaming through the windows. As I lay there listening to the birds singing outside and basking in the golden glow across my face, I’d feel it.

That elusive sense that I had arrived.

Only to, once again, arise to face the day and inevitably realize that whatever it was that I was looking for wasn’t quite there after all.

And I would go back to the beginning of my journey, back to my family and my roots…back “home.”

Only to keep searching.

What I finally realized was that home wasn’t just this idea or this place outside of me that felt right or good.

It wasn’t a group that offered me their approval.

Or a religion, whose rituals and promises I could hide behind or use to find a tribe.

It wasn’t even another warm body or a kind soul to wrap me in their arms at night.

Maybe, one day, I could find that bits and pieces of each of these things fit into my idea of home.

But home itself was within me.

To build a home meant first realizing that I would never really be fully home until I was able to recognize that I belonged wherever I was.

That I was “good enough” as I was. That no amount of twisting and turning or morphing into more acceptable versions of myself for others, simply to be accepted, would ever bring me true peace.

I could look and look for as long as I lived, but until I finally realized that what I was looking for was found inside me, I would never really find home.

And that wherever I went, and whoever I was with, there it would be—always accessible and always a reminder that I was enough.

It was home.

And home was within.

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