Home is Where the Yoga Mat Is
It’s not the house, friends, or culture that makes a place a home, but rather the ability to fully express oneself
Where are you from?
It’s a simple question asked whenever you meet someone for the very first time — on the first day of school, during a first date, or at a job interview. It typically comes right after, “What’s your name?” and, “What do you like to do?” It’s one of the first phrases you might master when learning a new language.
As humans, we love to ask about the place someone calls home because it helps us connect with one another. When we learn about the place where a person feels a deep-rooted sense of belonging, we get an immediate glimpse at their childhood and are provided with a reference for their accent or mannerisms.
For many people, that simple question has a quite simple, nostalgic answer, but between middle school and graduate school, this question paralyzed me. I had no idea where I belonged because I never had a strong sense of what it meant to call a place a home.
I was always anxious to meet new people, knowing that I would have to haphazardly string together some explanation for why I didn’t know where I was from after moving around in my childhood. In college, I never felt as excited to visit my family for the holidays as my peers felt about their travels home because my parents moved once every year after I left the house.
Maya Angelou once said:
“The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.”
For most of my life, my heart ached for such a place, but I failed to identify with anywhere I was living because I didn’t know what made a house, city, or state a home.
Struggling to fit in as the “new kid” in town
During the formative years of my childhood, my dad’s ever-changing jobs caused our three-person family to move between cities and states.
At nine years old, any sense of identity, belonging, and community I had established as a young girl was shattered when we moved from a suburb of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to the Hill Country of Texas. Having made my first — and last — true best friend and fallen for my first crush, I was heartbroken when I was unwillingly dragged halfway across the country.
As soon as I stepped foot on Texas soil, I felt like a fish out of water, so far from home.
Though I was initially hesitant to embrace the eclectic mix of German and Hispanic influences in New Braunfels, my lonesome self slowly began to warm up to simplicity of life in my new town.
Having played soccer in Pennsylvania, my parents encouraged me to join a team in New Braunfels, providing me with both with a joyful hobby and the friends that I so desperately needed to feel like I belonged.
But just as I was beginning to settle into my new home, my friend group secretly created a club against me — the “Anti-Forte” club, a nod to my maiden name — with no rhyme or reason other than to ostracize the new kid.
Any sense of belonging in this new place was instantly shattered when I became privy to this new, hurtful side of my so-called friends.
Two short years later, the moving van saved my distressed younger self and carried our possessions to Colleyville, a suburb nested in between Dallas and Fort Worth.
In Colleyville, life was not as simple as it was in the Hill Country. Here, I was expected to carry a designer purse around middle school and was pitied if I didn’t drive a luxury car in high school. Status was everything in the DFW metroplex, and for a girl who just wanted to live a modest life with average things, this new town was incredibly superficial and isolating.
Akin to New Braunfels, finding friends in Colleyville was challenging. As the “new kid” in seventh grade, it seemed as if everyone had already established their friend groups, formed over hopscotch in elementary school and exciting new extracurriculars in sixth grade. There just wasn’t any room for an outsider like me.
When I did find a friend group that I thought I would navigate the unchartered waters of high school with, they unexpectedly turned their backs on me — just like déjà vu. Those six girls whom I’d shared sleepovers and secrets with for two years quite literally turned on a dime and drew a line between me and them, stating we were no longer friends without a rhyme or reason.
Yet again, I was without any sense of connection needed to make a foreign place feel like home.
I spent the entirety of high school jumping between friends and boyfriends, adopting a myriad of personas in a frantic attempt to fit in. But no matter what version of “Brittany” I was — skater, nerd, diver, trendsetter — I never quite felt like myself.
Searching for a home in the desert
Looking back, I see that this nomadic lifestyle I had been unwillingly pulled into barred me from planting roots, growing branches, and establishing myself as a strong, unique young woman who was confident in herself.
I never attached to where I was living because I always failed to find — and maintain — a group of friends with whom I fit. Since I couldn’t find a sense of community, I never fully identified with the culture of my area. Most devastatingly, I was never able to figure out who I truly was because I was preoccupied with trying to fit the mold of each new city.
I so greatly wanted to belong in each of these places and to feel comfortable enough to be able to completely express myself without fear of judgement, but unfortunately, that feeling never came.
As senior year of high school approached, I knew I needed to once again spread my wings in search of a home — but this time, it would be on my own terms.
When I visited the University of Arizona at the age of 16, something shifted. I felt an unexplainable pull deep inside, drawing me to the land of prickly pears and majestic saguaros. Somehow, I knew this would be the place I could finally call home, so in 2012, I made the solo move to Tucson.
The first year of college was much like the first year of living in a new city. I had grown accustomed to the awkward struggle of making friends with people who already seemed to have deep-rooted bonds with other girls from high school, but thankfully, I quickly found a group of girls in my dorm with similar interests. I also met my now-husband in math class and joined a research lab full of people I could identify with, further deepening my connection to this new place.
Though relationships came easy and the culture was quickly embraced, I still felt like there was something missing to fully call Tucson my home.
If relationships, hobbies and culture were not enough, what would provide me with that sense of belonging for which my heart ached?
Finding a sense of belonging through shared movement, breath and self-expression
During graduate school, I found myself in the middle of a mental health crisis that forced me to reassess my priorities and search for the person I was destined to be — not the person who tried to desperately mold herself into countless friend groups.
As a compliment to the inner work I was doing in therapy, I began taking weekly yoga classes at a local studio to support the connection between my mind, body and soul.
What initially started as a self-conscious, wobbly practice blossomed into a beautiful form of movement that not only allowed me to connect with myself, but finally gave me that feeling of safety, acceptance and community I had been yearning for since I left Pennsylvania.
Yoga creates a community of individuals from different walks of life who have similar goals and intentions to take care of their bodies and minds. Though we may not speak to the person on the mat next to ours, we share a collective breath, movement, and energy as we take beautiful shapes of warriors, plants and animals. We encourage one another to attempt previously out-of-reach arm balances, cheering each other on through the attempt.
On my mat, I found myself able to let my walls down and fully express myself, free from judgement — something that I only felt comfortable doing in a place that is a home.
And though we may not interact outside out studio, the sense of belonging and understanding we create in the studio permeates into our everyday lives.
Not even the restrictions put in place because of the COVID-19 pandemic can shake that sense of community and belonging. Even though I’m practicing with my studio virtually, I pull on the thread of what it feels like to be in the presence of others — to hear our collective om, to feel our harmonious breath, to move through space on our individual mats as a group of individuals passionate about expressing and connecting with ourselves without judgement.
My yoga practice provides that safe place where I can go as I am and not be questioned.
No matter the city, state or building in which my practice occurs, I am home.
In just eight short months, my husband will graduate with his doctoral degree. We’ll willingly pick up the lives we built in Tucson over the last nine years and find a new place to start the next chapter of our lives, professionally and as a family.
When we decide on a new place to plant our roots, we’ll likely consider a myriad of factors that are important to us, like the quality of the public-school system, the plethora of outdoor amenities, our proximity to family, and the town’s diversity.
Once in that foreign place, I’ll do my best to make new friends, embrace the culture, and find new, local hobbies to help foster a sense of belonging.
Everyone I meet will ask me the same question that plagued me as a child and young adult — Where are you from?
Having navigated through several moves and been so desperate to call a place home, I now know it’s not the material things, the environment, the relationships, or even the house that truly make a place a home.
Instead, it’s the ability to be as I am, free to express myself without fear of judgement that can make any place feel like home.
So when someone asks me where I call home, I’ll let them know that wherever I roll out my yoga mat, I belong.
