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"You know that point in your life when you realize the house you grew up in...isn't really your home anymore...all of a sudden, even though you have some place where you put your shit, that idea of home is gone?"

-Garden State


I was driving to my old house today to see a friend. I moved out of my parents house, moved in with her, and then moved back. I started getting kind of sad, like, this old house isn't my home anymore, but my childhood home isn't really home anymore either. It's a very strange feeling, that you really only have some place to put your shit.

I got to thinking about this more, pretty much all day, and it really doesn't have to be a bad thing. As children, home is home simply because you know nothing else, you don't know of man-made Islands in Dubai, or of the Pyramids in Egypt, or beaches in St. Lucia. Those are all mere pictures in a book, not places to visit, not potential homes. You just see home, the address attached to your bookbag incase you or it gets lost, that is your end all, be all, desitnation of return. Some people may always have that inner connection to where they grew up, but others may not, and neither is better or worse than the other, it's just different.

When you start to disconnect from what used to be home, it can be very, very scary. But it is all in how you look at it, life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it. So taking that into account, the feeling of disconnection can be very liberating. Think about it, you could potentially go anywhere in the world and have that be home, if you wanted it to be. Maybe the scariest part of this is the actual making of a new home, not as much the idea of a new, different home.

Garden State is probably one of my favorite movies, and I never really figured out what it was really about until tonight ( I think). It is about home and what that really means. In the movie, Zach Braff never really seemed to have a real home because of his childhood, and that he sees where he was living in the movie as a "place to put your shit". He meets Natalie Portman, and it seems that she becomes home to him. Home doesn't seem so much a place as it does a state of mind. Some people can live out of a suitcase and have that be home for them because they're comfortable and happy with that. Others may have an actual home with a family and they may not consider that "home" because they aren't satisfied.

While I don't feel I have an actual home, I still feel at home, because for right now, I'm cool with where I'm at. But I know this won't always be home. For me, the end all, be all of home, is being anywhere in the world, with someone you care about, and being able to say "This is home".