Home is Where the Bags Are

Why is it, I have often wondered, that the questions of being a young 20-something begin their nagging in the early hours of the morning? Somewhere around 1 or 2 AM, when I'm otherwise on track to go to sleep, every pondering I might have creeps into conscious one after another until a ball of anxiety comes, only to dissipate into not enough sleep.

When we are in transit, for however long, what had once appeared routine and stable vanishes. Where we are, what we do in that place, and the people we come to know in that place all have a way of making themselves feel comfortable. They define us for what they are. We take them for granted because it's always been that way, or in the case of moving somewhere new, because that's what we came to do there, intentionally or not. We are the sum of our surrounding parts, validated by our participation in them. Yet when we move, that changes, and we have to start over and reconstruct the routines, the contacts, the comfort of familiarity. We become undefined in the new place simply by virtue of having no parts with which to form a sum, because those parts were left behind in memories somewhere else.

In the process of moving my things, first from the apartment I was living in, now from the friend's house I'm staying at, and amid all of the uncertainties of moving, the same questions of purpose and good faith in my own decision-making have come up. I have vacillated between being absolutely sure of my path, questioning it to the point of worry whether it was a good decision in the first place, and being ambivalent to everything about the move. For as much as I accept each move and each change as a part of life, a process that I have actively and willingly participated in, and one that I have mostly determined for myself, the sensation of letting life flow and not being in control of the outcome also pops up. I don't have any certainty about where the course of my actions will take me, but when I look back on the most momentous of the decisions I've taken—including, let's not forget, coming to Portugal in the first place—I never had that comfort. Comfortable decision-making is another way of lying to yourself that you know everything. If the decision is too exciting or too comfortable, it is an unfinished affair.

So I have come to the conclusion, after making myself at home in several apartment in Lisbon, with short periods of staying at this friend's house interspersed in between, that home is not a permanent anchor that will immediately provide us with a cocoon to retreat into from our real world selves. The highs and lows that we experience happen at home just as much as they happen outside of it. We can put as many posters on the wall, rearrange the furniture so many times, deep-clean the rooms, and spritz the air, but each place that we make home is a passing phenomenon. People come and go and their importance in life changes; some who may seem close often prove not to be and others who seem distant can come to be like family. Home is where the bags are and where our most important possessions reside, for however long, in whatever capacity.

Home doesn't have to be one house or one apartment or one building in which you spend years of your life nesting, attempting to create a domestic utopia. Home can be a dramatic sublet, a creaky old room on a high floor, a mattress on the floor in company that you enjoy. Home can be anywhere, so long as you take it there with you, because home is where you feel that you are realizing those things that make up who you are.

Video: Wine O'Clock: Changes

Aside from a new video, you can also now follow me on Bloglovin.

In which I make a video about how oops! I'm moving and everything changed because that's what it always does in the fall:

Notes from September

Although my posts around here appear consistent thanks to my activity elsewhere which ends up here, it is true that I've landed in a bit of a slump of writer's block. September has come and gone, and I'd like to recount some of the things that have been going on in the meantime.

September is a time of changes, and this year is no different. This year seemed to have a lack of a proper summer, with excessive heat, beach visits, and lots of social moments in the newly-freed time everyone is supposed to have at some point during the season. Then September came and threw the beginnings of fall at us, and without warning, the cozy routine of the past year seemed to disintegrate almost immediately. Most of my closest friends in Lisbon are leaving the city in pursuit of work or study, and there seem to be new opportunities around every corner.

The most visible change around here is that I stopped writing as much, and I'm still unsure of when I'll pick up the steam again despite my goals to write twice a week. I happened upon a bit of writer's block while becoming more creative in other areas, which has led to me designing more graphics, working on a podcast with Casey, making more videos, and other fun and creative projects that end up taking the wind out of my writing. I'm still around and still doing things, what's changed is that I'm more dynamic about it.

Singer, video maker, and all-around fabulous human being Meghan Tonjes created an idea and a hashtag #30daytodo starting in September as a way to focus on taking your life and shaking it up one thing at a time. With an average of 30 days each month, one small thing taken off a list becomes more manageable than the lofty resolutions we tend to set for ourselves and forget about as quickly as we set them. I didn't create a list of 30 things to do in September, but did take inspiration from the idea to do some cleaning house and figure out what my priorities are for how I want to live my life now and not just in the ambiguous future. Sort of like Pinterest, but for life habits and not creating a dream wedding. And in the same spirit, I have an actual cork board with some of those things pinned to it, because I'm nothing if not literal:

All of these changes combined to make me reevaluate my current living situation as well. The apartment I live in is fine, in the sense that on paper all of the conditions are great. I have a lot of space, very few roommates, an abundance of privacy. As with anything, cracks have appeared over the course of these months, and I now find the flights of stairs a tedious impediment to my desire to leave the house much of the time, the noise from the street is so loud and constant as to interrupt my creative endeavors, the ceilings too high to avoid echo, and so on. The little things that I chose to overlook because of the on paper conditions are now liabilities that were bound to pop up. Yet instead of moving house to another place in Lisbon and plodding along, September brought with it much bigger changes, and I'll be moving to Barcelona at the end of this month instead, taking a leap and seeing what comes of things.

It's time. It was time. I'll write a proper post about moving soon (I don't want to jinx the innumerable layers of bureaucracy I have to get through), but in the meantime, keep your eyes peeled for an October filled with more things I make, from videos to graphics, and beyond.