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Home Is Where You Are

What is ‘home’ really? Is it a person, place, or feeling?

Kate Ward
6 min readMar 28, 2019

It’s been almost five years since I’ve felt completely “home” anywhere. There’s always this piece inside of me that’s stuck standing on the doormat, afraid to feel safe here.

Yes, there are locks on my door. And no, I’m not scared of someone breaking and entering. It’s not that kind of fear.

It’s deeper, kind of existential fear of keeping my feet still, of planting roots where I’m standing.

I’ve moved cities five times since I graduated from college. And despite living in the same apartment in LA for nearly two and a half of those years, the photos my girlfriend and I framed never made their way up onto the walls. Lingering in the back of our minds, was always a question of when (not if) we would leave.

And like we assumed, we eventually walked away. We packed up our things, threw the big stuff in storage, and moved temporarily across the country again.

This kind of psychological homelessness that I’m describing is a choice.

It’s much less about the physical comforts and way more about the psychological ones. It’s about experiencing some mental blockage that never allows you to be fully where you are.

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Kate Ward
Kate Ward

Written by Kate Ward

Thinking deeply about how to make myself and the world a little better. & writing about creators mostly | email: kate@onedayent.com

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