There's a particular feeling when I come back from a trip.
I travel a great deal, and I'll often tell people that I feel at home wherever I am in the world. It's true. Continents, countries, borders, they no longer have much effect on me. I can sit in a hotel room on the other side of the planet and feel, quietly and completely, that all is well.
And yet, coming through my own front door after time away, especially when my wife and I have both been travelling, and seeing our two children waiting for us, something happens that still surprises me. My eyes fill. Every time. My heart's already full, and somehow it gets fuller.
I've thought a lot about those two feelings, the home I carry everywhere and the home I walk back into. They taught me something about what home actually is.
How do you feel at home in yourself?
You feel at home in yourself by removing the effort to be someone you're not. Home isn't something you build. It's the settled sense that all is well underneath, already there, buried under years of coping, performing and bracing. When those layers come off, you don't arrive somewhere new. You come back to where you always lived.
That's why people who are at home in themselves can feel at home almost anywhere. They aren't looking for the right place. They've brought it with them.
Why do so many people feel like guests in their own life?
Because they've been living as a role, and a role can be comfortable, but it's never home.
Many people I meet have built good lives. Good homes, good jobs, people who love them. And they still feel, somewhere underneath, like a guest. As if they're visiting their own life rather than living it. As if any moment someone might ask them to leave.
That feeling almost always comes from the same place. Somewhere early, they learned to be a particular version of themselves to stay safe or loved. The helpful one. The impressive one. The easy one. That version got them through, and it kept running. So they built a whole life around it, a life that fits the role perfectly and fits them only partly. No wonder it doesn't feel like home. The person it was built for isn't quite them.
If that sounds familiar, feeling stuck despite success describes the same gap from another angle.
What is home, really?
It's not an address. It's a state.
When I say I feel at home anywhere, I don't mean every place is comfortable. Some aren't. I mean there's a peace in my heart and a sense of all is well that doesn't depend on where I am. It came from within, and it goes where I go.
But the other kind of home matters too. The people who wait for you. The door you know. Being loved in a particular kitchen. That's home too, and it's precious. What I've learned is that the two kinds of home aren't in competition. When the inner one is settled, the outer one becomes more joyful, not less. You arrive with more to give, and you can let yourself be received.
What happened to the home I used to feel?
It got covered, not lost.
You did not lose yourself. You covered yourself up before a long winter away. You've been standing in the hallway for years, mistaking the sheets for the rooms. It isn't emptiness under there. It's your whole life, draped and waiting. Every room intact.
Most people can remember a time when they felt at home in themselves without thinking about it. Often it's childhood, before the first real corrections. Sometimes it's a stretch of adult life, a summer, a trip, a relationship, when something eased and they felt like themselves. Then life got busy, or hard, or both, and the sheets went back on, one by one, until the house looked empty.
The house was never empty. That's the most important thing I can tell you. You are not broken. You are buried, and the one under the sheets has been waiting for you to come back. Everything you remember feeling is still there, under the covers.
How can I find my way back home today?
Here's a practice for this evening. It takes about five minutes, and it's best done somewhere quiet, sitting down.
Close your eyes and remember one moment, from any time in your life, when you felt completely at home in yourself. Not happy, necessarily. At home. It might be tiny: sitting on a step in the sun, walking alone in a city, laughing with an old friend. Let the scene come back as fully as it will.
Now notice what's in your body as you remember it. Where is the ease? Chest, shoulders, belly, face? Let yourself feel it.
Then ask one question: what wasn't there in that moment?
Most people discover that what was missing was effort. There was no one to impress, nothing to prove, no one to manage. They weren't trying to be anyone. That absence is the key. Home isn't made of anything you add. It's what's there when the trying stops.
If the moment you remembered was a long time ago, don't let that discourage you. The length of time since you last felt at home says nothing about whether you can feel it again. It only tells you how long the sheets have been on.
Before you open your eyes, let a little of that ease stay with you. Notice that you can feel it now, here, today, in a completely different place and time. That's because it was never in the place. It was in you.
What does coming home feel like?
Like remembering, not like arriving.
When people remove the layers that have covered them for years, they rarely describe becoming someone new. They describe coming home. Marko Mladenovic wrote to us three years after working with me, in words now on our stories page: "I am still in such a peaceful, blissful, joyful state. I feel like I have finally found the answers on my question, Who am I?" The answer to that question and the feeling of being home turn out to be the same thing. You can read more about the question itself in who am I.
For me, coming home looks like the life I have now. I work when I want, I travel when I choose, I have real time with my family. I'm free in just about every sense there is. And the reason I can feel at home anywhere is that I finally came home to myself first. That's what unbecoming is for: not arriving somewhere new, but returning somewhere real.
What can I do for the people who are my home?
Tell them, today.
Whoever they are, your family by blood or the family you chose, don't wait for a special occasion. Send a note. Make a call. Do one small thing that says you matter to me. We all want more of that, and most of us give it too rarely.
And if you'd like to begin coming home to yourself, I made a free masterclass for exactly that, called Who Am I? It's a quiet first step inside, towards the rooms that have been waiting under the sheets.
Robert Simic, guiding the remembering.