I Found Home, Again
Home - what does it mean? Is home a physical structure like a house, condominium, apartment etc? Or is it something more than that? I personally believe the latter and so did the person who uttered the phrase “home is where the heart is.” This then leads to a deeper question - where is the heart so you know that you’ve found its home? To answer that question you have to do some soul searching. After I did my soul searching I found the answer to be this: for your home to have that heart, it has to be a place where you feel a sense of stability, consistency, and affection. It should be a rock that serves as the foundation for your life, a sanctuary where you feel like nothing can threaten or defile it. This home is a foundation that protects you from being cast into the sea when the emotional or physical tides of life hit you.
Finding Your Heart
You might wonder how this foundation is created - i.e. how does your physical home become your spiritual home? The answer is that there has to be consistent nurturing and support within your physical home for this to happen. There needs to be a sense of harmony and love when you’re growing up. In this case it has very little to do with what material things are in the home, but rather what kind of energy is in the home. What are the relationships between the people living inside of the dwelling? Do they get along or are they constantly fighting? Do they care for one another? This will all determine if the heart is in that home. The more harmonious and caring the home is, the more heart that dwells within it. On the contrary, less getting along and more fighting means less opportunity to develop an emotional and spiritual bond with that home. These levels of heart inside the home can have profound impacts on childhood development.
Sparking a Connection
In addition, material items inside the home, as well as the outside environment, can also give a person a sense of fulfillment and lead to emotional and spiritual attachment. For instance, when I was a kid living in a high rise, I fondly remember seeing the city from the window and admiring the city lit up at night. Then there was also my Super Nintendo I always enjoyed playing. There was the way I felt getting hugs from my dad and how my mom would make food and how we’d sit together at dinner as mom, dad and son and just talk. All of this is very important because next to love and affection is also a sense of fulfillment. Feeling like you’re part of a system that acknowledges you and recognizes you and doesn’t want to change you into someone you aren’t is a crucial part of developing heart in the home. Note that I am in no way advocating for children growing up in homes where they are spoiled and given everything their hearts desire without working for it. I’m advocating for children being nurtured and understood when they’re brought into an existence that they didn’t sign up for but, happened to show up in. Healthy and happy children most likely will become happy and healthy adults.
Where the Heart isn’t
The bad news is this heart where the home is can break and the stable rock can either shatter or disintegrate. This heart can fall out in one fell swoop or it can happen gradually over time. There was one piece of news that when I heard it broke my heart. I’ll never forget when I heard from both my parents the news that we had to move out of the apartment I felt so much warmth in and remember so fondly to go live with my grandparents in the hills of Bel Air. When I heard that news I got sick to my stomach. I was told it was only going to be for a temporary 4 months but ended up being five years and that’s a story for another blog post. In my eyes where my grandparents lived was a place I was used to visiting but living there felt as if I was in some sort of purgatory for a crime I didn’t commit. As much as my parents would downplay how divorce is normal and natural, nothing would really change the fact of how traumatizing the transition. Ironically, I was going from a condominium into an actual “home” but that “home” never felt like home and to this day I’d much rather live in an apartment or condo than in the suburbs or traditional homes. Even though this new “home” was much bigger than my previous one, the one I was used to disappeared and I had to transition into the discomfort of a new, broken system that I never seemed to acclimate to. Despite how large the house was, no heart existed there. The heart left when I didn’t see my parents together. The heart left when the neighborhood I was used to turned into a bunch of random houses next to me. The heart left when all the rituals I seemed to remember from the condo were no longer relevant. The heart left when I felt as if I wasn’t being recognized and just in the middle of my parents’ arguments.
Being a Pawn isn’t Fun
When the heart leaves unfortunately it’s doesn’t just leave a vacuum. What replaces it are feelings of abandonment and self-pity. The worst part is trying to communicate these feelings to people who couldn’t care less about your pain and frustration. To these people you aren’t homeless because your house is huge and you should feel privileged living in such a big house, when in reality, nothing could be further from the truth. I didn’t need a big house - I needed the heart. I needed something that I could feel at home in. Physical size didn’t matter in the least. What mattered to me was feeling as if I was in a place where I had those things that I mentioned before: stability, consistency, and affection. Those things were eroding in my new “home.” The stability wasn’t there because at any given moment, since it was my grandmother’s house, it was a shared home for anyone in the family to come in and out as they pleased. The only thing that was consistent was being used as a pawn in a game where both sides of the family would give bad messages about each other through me. Affection was very superficial in that I would only get it if I sent those negative messages through to the other side. As I felt this rock of stability eroding, I started doing worse in school. I’ve already talked about how terrible and unhelpful the education system we grow up with is so this situation only compounded my frustrations and pain.
Recklessly Abandoned
After a year of this situation the bitterness still didn’t go away. The main characteristic that defines being at a place where your heart is the feeling of belonging. The feeling that people are on your side/team and are there for you is so important for people’s development. When you these kinds of people aren’t around, you feel very alone and isolated. Sometimes there may be a feeling of resentment towards the people you see that have their families intact. You wonder how there are people whose parents are still married and never had to deal with bickering between their families for a day in their lives. You ask yourself sometimes what you’ve done wrong to lose your home. Even though you know you’ve done nothing wrong and you’re just a victim of circumstance you still question if there’s any justice in the world. The worst part is how you want people to know your story and what you’re going through, but you know that it’s low on their list of priorities so sometimes you just suffer in silence. Eventually you develop feelings of nostalgia for the good old days when you lived in that actual place of where your heart actually was. It’s a double whammy: the first one is an unhealthy obsession with the past and the other is an unhealthy obsession with some future time where all of your problems will just disappear.
Seduction and Abduction by Cults
The stronger these unhealthy obsessions get the deeper and deeper you go into rabbit holes. You start to look for something or someone to get angry at and become a crusader against some outside force to numb the pain that you’re feeling. For me that became the schools (although my frustrations with them were justified). Then it became the Israeli-Palestinian conflict even thought that had nothing to do with what I was going through. The more dis-empowered and disenfranchised you feel the more you look to something outside of you to get a sense of power back. Through the internet you find people who have “made it” and you become addicted to finding a way to reach out to them. Sometimes your story falls on deaf ears and other times you successfully get through to them only to have them betray you or find out they’re not the person you think they were. Other times you may fall victim to predators and cults, especially financial cults like multi-level marketing. You think that some us vs. them cult is your ticket to your salvation only to find out that they’ll only be your home if you give up your individuality and become indoctrinated by all that they have to offer. It’s sickening and disgraceful. These cult-like atmospheres lead you to put your heart in the wrong place. As I discussed in my last post, these places thrive off of an us vs. them mentality and you can only have that mentality for so long until it finally becomes exhausting, tiresome, and unproductive.
Heart at the End of the Tunnel
Despite all of this, there is still hope and as hard as it is to believe, things can be much better than when you first found that feeling of home before it was broken. How that can happen is knowing where your heart is and what the true meaning of that is. The heart can be in a lot of places and that place doesn’t necessarily have to be a physical structure that protects you from the elements. That place can literally be in the sky. I’ve done some really awesome things in my life with traveling solo and practicing flying having been some of the highlights. When I’m in the air and I’m speaking to the person in the other seat about their lives, ideas, and the country they live in, I feel happy. When I spend a big chunk of change but I’m learning how to pilot a helicopter with an instructor I’m happy. When I hostel in a foreign country and get to explore what it has to offer I’m happy. What this means is that I know I have a heart of exploration, I have a heart of curiosity, I have a heart of passion and I have a heart of technology. These subjects and ideas that I enjoy being around and talking about are my home because they are where my heart is. Thus, for me home is more of a feeling than an actual place. Once you figure that out you’ll understand home more. I work at an electronics retail store in the gaming section and I remember going to that gaming section and being happy in my youth so that’s a part of my home too.
The Past Never Lasts
Many of you might be looking back to yesteryear and thinking “if only I had yesteryear back. That’s when I was ‘home’.” I won't blame those of you for having that mindset but, the sooner you snap out of it the better. I know I’ve felt mentally better when I snapped out of it. It’s very seductive because you get a moment of your past and you put it on a pedestal. The truth is that what happened with my parents and the days that they enjoyed each other's company and were around me were nothing but pure happenstance. It just felt so real and right to me at the time. To the person who lived next door to me it meant absolutely nothing. To be obsessed with something that is gone and done is just neurotic. I must admit to being neurotic myself because of the pain I was in at one time. I remember going back to where my old condominium was when my parents were still married. I was trying to peek into the garage, flying my drone over where the pool was, and staring into the lobby. At that time my desperation was obvious. I was thinking I just wanted a taste of “how it used to be” yet it would never be like that anymore.
The Tides of Change
A while ago, I began to notice parallels between my previous longing for yesteryear and the economic situation in America. It seems that factory workers in middle America consider their home to be the factory. However, those are getting automated and in the psyches of many Americans their mental home is thinking that you work for your money or you get nothing. We don’t understand that with the 21st century we have been served eviction notices to these old ideas but we are not honoring those notices. These old ideas stand on the shores of ignorance and many people are oblivious to the impending tsunami of automation that will hit soon. If we stay on these shores we will be cast out to sea.
Where the Heart Thrives
You may be wondering how I ended up finding my home after these turbulent times. The answer is simple. For the longest time I was trying to find a home with some online courses I joined to become rich and famous. I never found a home in those things. The Yang campaign and the people in the Yang Gang is where I found a home in the sense of where my heart is. The people in this campaign are the most passionate, forward thinking, and open minded people I’ve ever met. They take the time to listen to me and actually care about me as an individual. We share a common bond that isn’t easily broken. It’s not about celebrity it’s about humanity. I’m in the Yang Gang because I know this forward thinking way of embracing abundance and the future is the right idea. I recently had the privilege to attend an Andrew Yang rally in Long Beach and it was an incredible experience. Standing in the big conference hall with fellow Yang Gang members and having Andrew Yang come in and embrace all of us and treating us all like we mattered and had a voice - that’s what home feels like to me. It’s when I matter and I have a voice. We didn’t come together to berate each other, speak against a common enemy, and/or constantly complain about how bad things have gotten. Rather, we came together to talk about what kind of country we can create that’s much better than the one we have now. We discussed how we’re going to solve new problems with new solutions. At that moment being right under Yang listening to him and actually being around people who care about felt like a true home. Even after the rally was over, when we went out together I still had that feeling of being at home. I’m here to tell all of you that this is possible for each and every one of you. For me it’s the Yang campaign but for you it can be something else. Just know that it’s never too late and your heart is somewhere out there. Find out where that place is and home will be waiting.