Like a Hermit in My Own Head

That "welcome home" is for me. Not you. You're welcome to feel welcome. But the new home is mine - I'm finally moving into it - and you're not welcome there. Get your own.

I feel like I've lived my whole life in someone else's home. There was my parent's home, then rentals that were owned by landlords. Even when my wife and I bought a house, it was still the bank that held the deed.

But even more significant than the literal ownership of the building I lived in was the energetic ownership. And the energetic ownership of the buildings I lived in was mirrored by the ownership of the life I lived in - and sadly, it wasn't mine.

I grew up believing that I should not belong to myself. Other people were always more important. My own desires were to be ignored. Finding a romantic relationship was the pinnacle of existence. If I couldn't find someone to want me for forever, my existence was not justified. It was a desperate situation.

So all of my goals, all my thoughts, all my actions were oriented toward the woman I would find, the life we would share, the relationship we would build. I was to build it and maintain it... until somebody died.

Before I got married, that was the life I was living in - one I hadn't achieved yet. I didn't want to create my own life and welcome someone to share it with me. Life was on hold until I could find someone to build with. That's right. I was raised to codependency. 

So once I did find someone that wanted me for forever, life didn't change much. I was already well practiced at living in a home (and life) that wasn't my own. It was hers. I thought the ideal relationship would be me building up her life while she was building up mine. But that didn't happen. We were both building up and living in her life - her home.

But even if my ideal had been realized, it wouldn't have been healthy. When you rely on another person to fulfill your needs and healing and wholeness, you become dependent on them - desperate for them. It's not healthy. I was raised to dysfunction. And now I'm trying to escape it.

I think the Death Cab for Cutie song Marching Bands of Manhattan talks about this - about the gradual transition from living your life for another person to finding comfort and sorrow in the solitude of your own heart. It's not as thrilling as losing yourself in love, but it's also not as heavy as accepting the responsibility for building someone else's life.

At about the same time as started letting go of a relationship-centric life and trying to move into my own life, I also moved into a house that was completely mine. I started living alone there as the sole owner. It was an abused and neglected house. Many of the walls had been stripped down to boards. There was trash everywhere. The plumbing was broken. It had been robbed of its warmth. It had been robbed of its power.

With no utilities, I was basically a squatter in my own house. But I was home. I felt like the house was me: abused and neglected - not functioning. I was finally moving into myself. It has been a slow and sorrowful process. When your whole existence for decades has been focused on the excitement of living in someone else's home, the decision and actualization of growing into your own person is a difficult and frustrating process. Sometimes you just want to go back to where there's water and power.

But that would be giving up what I've been working toward - something new and healthy, independent and whole. I'm still debating if my heart is half empty or half full. My love for that old life has not yet drown. Maybe it never will. I should appreciate what brought me to where I am. But I hope my love and investment in myself fills me ever so much more than anything outside myself.

I'll finish with a quote from Carl Jung. It's a hard truth, and I don't think many people can do it:

To love someone else is easy, but to love what you are, the thing that is yourself, is just as if you were embracing a glowing, red-hot iron; it burns into you and that is very painful. 

Therefore, to love somebody else in the first place is always an escape which we all hope for, and we all enjoy it when we are capable of it. 

But in the long run, it comes back on us. You cannot stay away from yourself forever. You have to return, have to come to that experiment, to know whether you really can love. That is the question - whether you can love yourself. And that will be the test.