When I decided to write 30 blogs for 30 years, it made complete sense that the concept of home and the process of moving had to be up there. In my 30th year, it's become a running joke that I move nearly every year. I also don't think that's an entirely uncommon thing amongst people in their 20s and, in just a couple months, I will be moving again.
The first time I ever properly moved - forgetting the moves I made as a kid which I had 0 influence on - was for University. To be honest, across these 30 blogs, you'll find that a lot of things start with University. I cant even remember if it's an actual stipulation in off-campus house contracts or some unspoken fact but you will move every year. I was there for 4 years and I lived in 4 accommodations - one off-campus University-run 4 floor building and 3 houses within walking distance. I'm not entirely sure if any of them felt like home in the sense that I know the definition now, but I can say that moving was a lot easier because I had barely anything to move. Those houses were momentary, flexible places to encounter a suspended version of life. You knew you'd leave, you knew it was temporary and so even the bad parts didn't matter because you knew it wouldn't be forever. The friendships were special, though. Not all survive. Correction: very few survive. If you put late-teen or early twenties students in a house together, it's gonna be a kettle of tension and instability and just pure chaos. But that's kind of what Home - beyond literally going back to your childhood home - meant at that time. It was the strange, surreal existence you were all living, surviving a melee of frustrations and aggressive passions; of friendships so close and then friendships faded. Home in your early twenties - University or otherwise - is a veritable place of human calamity in the best and worst way possible.
There is a point, much like other things during the transition to adulthood, where that feeling and warmth for transience begins to falter. For me, I think it was a pretty stereotypical age to feel it: 25. Far be it from me to fall into movie tropes and stereotypes, but life being inexplicably changed at 25 seems like an unavoidable fact. Is there a science to that? Like genuinely is that when our brains decide to switch? It's the same with everyone I know.
Anyway - focus Liam, this isn't a voicenote to your best friend - 25, for me, was an odd birthday. It was Covid and I was living in a quiet area of Isle of Dogs in London in a split-level flat that, honestly, was more delightful than I gave credit to at the time. I walked down the stairs and my flatmates had put up decorations and were playing music to welcome me to my mid-twenties. It was nice, but I started to feel as if I wouldn't be as ready to leave that flat as I had been previously. I started to feel that I was getting closer to what I needed from a Home, I just didn't know what exactly that was at the time.
Then we got evicted. I'm not sure it would be a legal eviction anymore. To be honest, I don't think it was legal then either, but let's not get into that now. We all had to leave fairly quickly and I was, once again, saying goodbye to another home and, specifically, the first I'd properly lived in and been on the contract for in London (I stayed over various friends houses occasionally before that).
I was back to my childhood flat, in the town I grew up in. A very bizarre, almost sickly feeling at that time. It doesn't feel that way anymore but when you move to London, with all its lights and madness, and feel a sense of inner pride for overcoming the fear, it is not an easy thing to be returned back to the countryside that sheltered you. Again, no shade to the countryside, it was a beautiful place to grow up and was my first concept of Home but, at 25, it felt like a regression in my personal progress.
Despite fearing temporary houses and likely flushed with the excitement of having a new close friend I'd met not long before through another friend, I moved back to London. More specifically, I moved in with my new best friend at the time, who I'd also built a theatre company with. Now, if you're already of a certain age or have already spent many a situation moving in with your best friends, you know this is a canon experience we all have to go through. That sounds dramatic but we literally had a theatre company and were both theatre kids, it was always going to be dramatic. She would agree and has before that it was a multi-emotional, intense rollercoaster ride of extreme highs and extreme lows. They often say that some best friends can live with each other and some cannot. I think we occupied an odd space in between the two. We were both excellent flat mates for each other and also frequently sick of each other. Again, we lived with each other, often had dinner together, often went shopping together and we worked on a theatre company during covid together, whilst still having full-time (or furloughed at times) jobs. It was commendable ambition, but not entirely smart.
This is kind of the point, though. It is 'canon' because to discover what Home is for you, you have to meet variations of what 'good' is, what 'bad' is and then appreciate where your comprises lie. It feels frustrating to have to compromise at all or to think that there will be 'bad' in any Home but there is. I still love the memories at that flat and we were there for nearly two years. It was the most stable piece of instability I'd experienced yet. It is a contradiction that cannot fully be described, other than it will feature in some script or novel in the future I imagine. It's every picture of chaos that fits those mediums because it is a bit like working in retail - of which we both had experience - where you both have struggles and that creates both loyal support and friendship, whilst also bringing some of the worst stressors to the forefront. No-one in retail and no-one who has lived with their best friend can ever tell you they regret it entirely or that it is simplistic to describe emotionally. It is purely, as shown here, a two-paragraph or more tale to regale.
Then came the 'living alone' era.
Easily one of the most transformational periods of my life, living alone was the perfect next step for living with one other person - and occasionally her partner. I had all the good memories of living with a friend and, also, all the good memories of living with multiple friend in past homes. Then I had the feeling of independence and the freedom - being considerate of neighbours - to sing as loud as I want, to decorate as personally as I wanted and to learn who I was and what I liked. That's the closest to Home I've gotten in 30 years. Not that it's all easy. Living alone means everything is your responsibility - the rent, the electricity, the things that break, the marks you have to clean, the fox that comes to your window, the excessively loud shouty neighbour above you - all yours to deal with. It's freeing and also lonely. Lonely in a good way, lonely in a bad way (that's a blog coming up in itself so no more on that).
Now, following a rather rug-pulling redundancy and 13 months unemployed, living with my sister and then living with my aunty, I'm employed again and ready to move. Here, approaching 30, I'm left with every lesson and experience I've encountered across, realistically, about 8 homes. Even now, I haven't got a perfect idea. I'm battling between living alone or living with someone - that's probably the one thing I'm most torn on. I both love the independence and love the companionship. But I know Home should feel safe, should inspire you not to hide away or to shrink into just what you're comfortable with. Home should be close enough to at least 1 friendship or family because being left too far is isolating, even when you love your independence. Home is both the freedom to feel good, to dream and have the opportunity to do what you want but Home should also be the thing that propels to do things you're afraid and to spend as much time out of it, as you do within it.
Home, for all my yapping on about transcience, is never permanent even when you've lived there fore something like 10 years. It should always be something that is open to change, that is dependent on your own circumstances, your own loves and likes, and on the fundamental needs of your spirituality and strength.
Home isn't necessarily what you make it, but it is how you feel shaping it.
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