COMING HOME

Coming Home

For 26 years, I’ve lived outside the walls of my childhood. And yet, somehow, I never really arrived anywhere.

Every apartment, every house I moved into felt like a waiting room between one version of myself and the next. A stopover. A holding pattern. My spaces were functional, sometimes even beautiful — but they never held me. I was a nomad, not just in body, but in soul. Restless. Always chasing the next: the next city, the next dream, the next beginning that might finally feel like something real. I poured my time, my heart, and every cent I had into my work. My home always got what was left over — whatever pieces of me hadn’t already been spent.

But this year, something shifted. It didn’t crash in —i t crept. Soft. Unnoticed at first. A stillness took root in me, something sacred and quiet. For the first time in my life, I began to want to stay. Not because I had to. Not because I was tired. But because I was full in a way I hadn’t felt before. For the first time, home began to mean something.

I started to pour love into these walls, the way I used to pour it into projects and deadlines. The art that once hung in my studio now lives in the corners of my house. The shelves hold my curiosities, my tiny sacred things — the relics of places I’ve been, the bits of beauty I once only saw as fragments of a life that lived outside me. My home became a reflection of my insides. Of who I am when I’m not becoming someone else.

My son said it best: “Mama, our home is us now. And everything here is an experience.”

And it is. Each room is its own world. Every corner holds a memory, a piece of me. Where I once longed to escape, I now linger. I run my hands along black walls that once felt too bold for permanence. I sit in my painting corner — my little altar of creation — and I feel whole. Even the plants, it seems, have decided to stay. They’ve never grown like this before. Maybe they, too, feel that something has finally taken root.

I am still a nomad at heart. I will always crave the unknown, the pull of other places. But I no longer run from the present moment. I no longer believe that home must be found somewhere else. For years, I envied those who found peace in stillness — who were content with the rhythm of a garden, the sweetness of quiet, the poetry of ordinary days.

I used to think they lacked vision.

Now I know they had what I was searching for all along.

It wasn’t the next city.

It wasn’t the next life.

It was presence.

It was peace.

It was the art of living well in the here and now.

The Stoics speak of this often — not in the language of candles and cozy corners, but of inner fortitude. Of not needing to run, because you have already arrived. “Nowhere you can go is more peaceful, more free of interruptions, than your own soul.” wrote Marcus Aurelius.

And maybe that’s what I’ve found. Not just a place to be — but a place where I can simply be myself.

I am not chasing anymore.

I am home.