What does it even mean to have a home?

Lately, I’ve been on a YouTube room tour binge. Sewing rooms, craft rooms, makeup rooms, art workstations, home offices, bedrooms, altars, multi-purpose spaces. (Then there’s this gorgeous bedroom/office/dungeon combo on Tumblr that took my breath away; it may be slightly NSFW because you see sex toys in one picture.)

I see these rooms, and I get wistful. I imagine having spaces just like that: everything functional and beautiful, little nooks for me to work or craft or write or read while surrounded by art and postcards and mementos, sacred space that’s also creative space that’s also dream space that’s also growth space. Books surround me and planner stickers hang next to the poster that says Will Work For Travel and in a little cubby sits a peridot, an amethyst, a candle, and a glittery picture of Maleficent.

Some of these are already here: a small stack of stickers is hung on hooks on the backsplash of my desk, next to the Will Work For Travel art piece; the peridot and the amethyst are hidden away in a leather box with other potions and notions; Maleficent looks down at me from where she is perched, high up on the bookshelf-desk right by the clock.

But this space is not really mine.

It is “my” room, in the house my parents bought and built. The bed used to be mine when I was in college. The furniture has lasted a few moves. There are childhood trophies on a shelf, pictures of my younger self. But 95% of the books on these shelves belong to my parents, who cannot agree on whether to keep them or dispose of them (they have diametrically oppositional views on cleaning up). The drawers are filled with old stationery and papers and broken pens that I have never used. The magick-makers are in a leather box because everyone else in this house are snoops with no concept of privacy or personal space. (I already have had multiple arguments with them over my wardrobe.)

I reside in a simulacra of myself; the room is fuller with my parents’ impressions and mental image of me, rather than who I really am.

The place I was in before I was forced to leave the country was probably the closest I ever had to my own space. I lived in a studio, a steal for Bay Area rents, just enough for a bed and a desk and a triangular nook that turned into an altar space. I had inherited it from a friend, who used this space to heal from a rough breakup; that space similarly became my attempt at freeing myself from a hostile living situation, a place that my at-the-time companion and I magically manifested and conceived as home but quickly became full of emotional traps and mind games and hearing tuned up so I could listen out for her footsteps on eggshell carpets.

And yet I never really felt settled, at home, in my space there. It was lonely; I did have friends who lived nearby, and my place was relatively accessible, but I spent more time at their places than they ever did at mine. The one and only time I adopted a cat, I developed severe allergies to the point of hospital visits and nightmares that I will suffocate in my sleep and nobody will know. (The cat, last I heard, is in a good and safe home.) Weird hours plus terrible executive function meant more meals by SpoonRocket than anything cooked on my stove; besides, I hated cooking alone.

Perhaps the space was as healing for me as it was for the friend I inherited it from, though my recovery may have been more turmulent, involving devastating truth bombs and anger over repeated patterns and many nights with half of my bed turned into a table so I would never have to deal with sleeping alone. At the same time, I never really felt like I had found that sense of domesticity Kitty alludes to, the ability to settle in and nest and know that you always have somewhere to return to.

I don’t actually know how that feels like. I don’t understand how nests work.

The last place I felt any sort of domesticity was in the place I shared with another partner, my matey, in Brisbane. As far as living companions go, he was one of the best ones. We cooked together and cleaned together and tried to get rid of the overload of oranges we would get in CSA boxes and played games on our Wii. We entertained visitors — always a good motivation to clean. I even hosted a dinner party that turned into a performance art piece. In many ways, it was the ideal living situation: peaceful, accessible, frequently visited.

Even then, though, I had problems. My only space for me was less than half of the room my matey and I shared; most of my things were sitting in the garage, nearly wiped out by the 2011 floods (the old closet we placed them on sacrificed its life for my boxes). When other lovers came over I ended up in the living room, which a prior housemate had filled with her own art, leaving me no wall left to decorate. A neighbour said me trying to do a garage sale was somehow “devaluing the property”; another thought I was too loud at night.

Really, though, my issue wasn’t with settling in the apartment. My issue was that I was being too settled in Brisbane — in a time where I was rapidly losing communities and careers partly due to interpersonal drama in tiny social circles and partly due to backlash from a small industry that objected to me being vocal about its racism. Where I was paralyzed with despair from having to put out one more job application that I knew would not even get an interview because I was stuck on a bridging visa and while I technically could work nobody would let me. Where I spent many days in bed, staving off one medication change after another, the side effects messing with my sleep cycles and my cognition.

I was trapped. I wanted to leave. I didn’t want to abandon my matey or the space we created together for 4 years. But it felt like I could either stick with stability, and slowly fade away from stagnation, or take a chance and move halfway across the world to the city I fell in love with when I spent a joyous, creative, heart-filled summer. In an ideal situation, he would have come with me. In an ideal situation, I would have been straight.

(Some months after the breakup with the Bay Area ex, I contacted my matey in tears, saying that moving to the Bay Area and breaking up with him was a mistake and that I should have just stayed in Brisbane and be the normal straight girl everyone wanted me to be. He reminded me that I was literally close to dying in Brisbane, that even at my worst I seemed much happier and fulfilled in the Bay Area, that he would have been just as big a burden for me because he was happy with staying still but knew I needed to fly.)

I’ve always needed to fly. I come from generations of migrants, yet my parents are still flummoxed that I would rather live far away from what they think is the canonical answer for “home”. I understand airports better than I understand houses. I get restless when I am in one place too long.

But those are personal justifications for larger existential factors, a way to turn a major disadvantage in my favor. I’ve always needed to fly not just because I was born with wanderlust, but because I was also born a perpetual foreigner. I’ve been told to “go back to your country”, to leave the country I was born and raised in and head back to a place where I don’t speak the language and my clothing choices mark my gender as “are you a boy or a — oh wait, not from here, never mind”. I had to sit out five years of waiting on a mostly-pointless visa and hope that it didn’t become five years of wasted time. I tried so hard to stay in the Bay Area, where I felt like I was really just getting started, where I actually got interviews despite my weird visa status — but eventually the visa ran out and I had no replacements so I had to leave.

I left behind a lot of my things: in Half-Price Books in Berkeley, in the garage in Brisbane, on the curb and in Goodwill, in boxes mailed to my aunt in Virginia who keeps wondering what she’ll do with them if for some reason her family has to move overseas. So many books I never managed to get around to reading. My entire burlesque costume collection, most of them inherited by a friend. A small box of sex toys and a bottle of weird art perfume held with a couple of my best friends, because I trust them to not snoop and judge me. Art supplies as payment to another friend who cleaned out my kitchen when I couldn’t deal with the ant infestation. Clothes given away because I knew that wearing them here would get me in trouble. Anything beyond a 20kg per suitcase limit.

Economy class tickets dictate the bounds of what I get to keep when I move from place to place.

My parents said that they’ll eventually clear out all their stuff from my current bedroom so that I have much more space for my books and things. If they do get around to doing so, the emptiness would be stark: space everywhere, space that could have been filled with everything I had to let go of or keep away elsewhere. Compared to their rooms of hoarding, I have nearly nothing. And I’m not in a position to acquire more, either because they will poke and prod and disturb, or because I cannot get it anywhere near me, or because I need to move on again and there’s only so much I can carry in my suitcase.

I can understand why one of my parents leans towards hoarding, towards collecting, towards keeping everything with the slightest bit of nostalgia or sentiment. It adds a certain grounding to the space, roots you, it feels solid and dense and this place is full of me. I try to convince this parent to go all KonMari on this place sometimes, but I know that losing all those things would feel like cutting off a limb. There are holes there that shouldn’t be.

What is it like to never really have to move? To be able to stay some place long enough that you could attach pictures with nails rather than Blu-Tak? To have more than a suitcase’s worth of clothing? To know that you will, eventually, get to that book hanging out on your shelf — once you finish the one you’re reading right now? What’s it like to actually be grounded?

(I was never grounded growing up. Firstly, that’s not really a concept in my culture; it’s much more an American school trope. But also? I never really went anywhere. There wasn’t anywhere to go, to sneak out to, to warrant a grounding in the first place. All I had and all I needed was an Internet connection. That took me far enough.)

I’ve been thinking about moving a lot lately, mostly because I’m getting as bonkers about being stuck in Johor Bahru as I was in Brisbane — and Brisbane had a lot more going for it as a city than here. There is an apartment in Kuala Lumpur, bought as a rental investment, already in my name —so that when my parents die I would not have to deal with the religious authorities “redistributing” generations-old worth to random uncles while taking a cut for themselves. There are two bedrooms, and the “study” area is a bleak corner with no windows. When my parents suggested I stay in that apartment if I do move up to KL, I asked about converting the second bedroom to an office or work space so that there is more light. They complained that now they will have nowhere to sleep when they come over to visit. (I can tell you that “go stay somewhere else” will not go over well with these two.)

There’s also Melbourne, or anywhere else in Australia really, now that that visa worked out and I have permanent residency— I do have an opportunity in Melbourne that I could pursue, contingent on me earning enough to support myself there. Again, my parents want to help, again they want to stay with me for a while; while I appreciate the offer, I am already stretched past my limits by living with them since August, and would rather just have a space of my own.

But do I want a space of my own? I rued at not having my own room to keep my own things and do my own work, rather than being relegated to half a floor; yet when I was living alone with all the space to myself all I could feel was emptiness. My past experience with housemates were mixed at best; I was never really home long enough to bond with anyone, and my most recent ex has soured me on the idea. But at least back then I had my own room, my own art on the walls, an altar space that won’t get snooped on, a wardrobe I could wear without complaint. Someone who appreciated some level of domesticity.

Do I want to be domestic? Do I want to give myself the ability to bail out of a terrible living situation without feeling like I had to get rid of everything all over again? Do I want to take the risk of settling down, even if it means saying No to opportunities I would have pounced on because moving is too much of a hassle? Why am I asking this now, when such opportunities haven’t even materialized yet, even though I am more than primed for Get Me Out Of Here?

What would it be like to have a living situation that was both communal and individual, where I had the support and company of trustworthy housemates or companions (romantic or not) but also had my own room to do my own thing? Where I have some influence on the overall look and feel and have ful creative freedom in my own section of the space? Where I could invite people to work and play and sleep and chat and cook with me and also have the autonomy to ask for space? Where I could pack up and go if I really needed to, but I didn’t have to deal with the same mess of storage and selling and buyers and flakiness?

The people whose videos I queue up on Chromecast in the background so I can look on with envy while working on yet another job or fellowship application so that I could potentially move somewhere better: are they settled? Is their space fully theirs, without interference? Do they have control over who comes and goes? Do they know how to pack up and go at a moment’s notice, when Immigration tells you your time is up, when there are no job prospects near you, when leaving might be better than staying even if it means dealing with a lot of upfront pain? What happens to their beautiful setups if and when they have to leave?

Domesticity seems like something that sounds nice in theory but which hasn’t held out for me so well in practice. I can’t tell if it’s because it’s me, or because it’s my luck in life, or if it’s because I’m just too afraid to try being domestic. Being domesticated, like a cat or a dog, or like the sugar gliders local pet sellers have here that make me cringe?

What’s it like to be domestic?

What’s it like to have a home?

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