Chapter 45: NO (place like) HOME
A personal reflection on housing insecurity and belonging.
Part 1 – “There is no place like home”
“There is no place like home” Dorothy Gale proclaimed to the world as she clicked her heels three times. Upon opening her eyes, Dorthy returned home. It is one of the most recognizable lines in American culture, spoken as though home is obvious, universal, and waiting patiently for all of us to return. And home is one of the most assumed ideas in human culture. People speak about it as though it is instinctual, inherited, unquestionable. A place. A feeling. A return.
But for some of us, home never arrives as uncertainty and it requires inquiry to understand it. What happens when those words do not land? What happens when home is not a comfort? When opening your eyes does not bring resolution, but another unfamiliar room, another goodbye, another version of yourself learning how not to get too attached?
For me, I spent my whole life clicking my heels to open my eyes to nothing more than questions of what does home mean and why no one could tell me what it really meant for me. I think about home a lot…well, I use to. In a way that is not nostalgic. Nor in the way people talk about childhood bedrooms or familiar streets. I think about more like a problem that never quite resolves. Like a foreign word I keep turning over in my mouth, trying to see how to pronounce it correctly.
From years of journaling, I have come to understand that the question of home has been a constant in my life. That reflection did not emerge in isolation. It was shaped by frequent moves, repeated loss, and the absence of a space that ever felt truly safe. Home, or the idea of it, is woven so deeply into our lives that most people do not notice it. It functions like a foundation. It is quiet, assumed, and essential.
True to myself, when I have a question in my mind, I observe, ponder, research, contemplate, talk about the question and core idea. I search for meaning…not so much the answer.
I find that people talk about home like it is obvious. Like it is a place that waits for you. Like it has patience. Like it remembers you even when you forget yourself. I have always felt slightly defective in those conversations, like I missed a class everyone else attended early and then built their lives around. I did not grow up with a single place that held me. I learned early that stability was temporary, that attachment required caution. Moving became normal, leaving became practiced, and staying felt odd. I do not remember a moment where I was told, “This is yours. You can stay.”
My friends talked about home as history. As roots. As people who watched them grow up and still knew their names. I did not have that. I had death, trauma, loss, struggle. And with those so went the possibility of nostalgia. Grief was my memories.
When I saw people on television celebrating home (like laughing in childhood bedrooms, cooking family recipes, returning to parks that had their names carved in trees), I felt alienated. Not jealous. Alienated. Those narratives did not fit my nervous system. My memories were not warm. They were loud. Sharp. Reflection caused vigilance. When people talk about home as memory, I feel disconnected. I certainly learned survival before I learned belonging.
For a long time, I thought this meant something was missing in me. That I was trapped in some easy to escape room and I was really dumb (or way too smart – they feel the same sometimes) to figure how to open the door. But, lately, I feel that I was simply shaped for a different kind of work and life.
Pt. 2 – "You've always had the power, my dear. You've had it all along."
The moment that stayed with me was never Dorothy clicking her heels. It was Glinda telling her, “You’ve always had the power, my dear.” Not because Dorothy suddenly found a house to return to, but because someone finally named something she could not yet see in herself: that she belonged long before she understood what belonging meant.
As a child, I did not know why that mattered. As an adult, I simultaneously understand exactly why it did and fundamentally have no clue what it means.
Dorothy does not begin the journey knowing she belongs. She struggles. She wanders. She is frightened. She is dismissed. She searches for answers outside herself because no one has yet told her that she is allowed to be where she is.
Only after the journey. Only after she has survived, learned, endured does someone finally name the truth: She always had the power. To me that meant: “You belong. You always did.” That moment resonates with me deeply. Because belonging when it finally arrives for many of those of us who did not grow up held by safe, steady places of belonging, certainty, or continuity, is not discovered alone. It must be named for us. It must be reflected to us. Spoken into existence by someone who sees you and says, “You are not lost. And you never were.” That is the power of being.
But home is something else. I spent years trying to make home and belonging the same thing or feeling. If I could just belong. If I could locate that internal permission, then perhaps home would follow. I examined home from every angle: physical place, routine, lineage, ritual, memory, faith, love. Each definition felt close, but not quite true.
Belonging, I came to understand, is existential. It is about presence. About being allowed to exist without justification. Home, for me, is contextual. It is built. It is reinforced. It is held collectively. They are related, but they are not the same.
I do belong. I belong because I am here. Because I showed up. Because I live inside my own being with clarity and care. But I do not need a home in the way the world (…or I…) insists I should.
Now I understand this to be my truth: not having a home (in all of its meanings) is not just something I survived. It is also something I bring. I bring an attunement to impermanence. I bring sensitivity to transitions. I bring an ability to sit with people in constant change. I bring a way of seeing that does not assume safety but works intentionally to create it.
I bring the knowledge that not having a home (and everything that means to the world) does not make you less than and it certainly does not mean you do not belong. So, when I watch Dorothy clicking her heels now, I think less about where she lands and more about what finally becomes visible to her. Not her home. Not the place. Not her family. But, herself.
When I tap my heels and open my eyes, I do not wake up at home or with people. I wake up to the world that is in front of me and accept that it is always changing. I do not wish for something different or someone different.
And I bring that way of seeing into the world. The strange clarity of understanding home intellectually, emotionally, culturally, and even spiritually, while never fully experiencing it as something that settles inside me. Maybe that has always been my gift: not the ability to return home, but the ability to recognize belonging in places where others no longer look.