Longing for Home

Building a life of alignment

Image by Kristy Forbes

There is a kind of homesickness that has nothing to do with houses.

I’ve felt it for as long as I can remember.

A longing for a place, a world, a way of being with others where my body wouldn’t have to brace so much.

Somewhere the air didn’t ask me to translate myself before I could breathe. Somewhere the rules made sense. Somewhere love didn’t feel like ownership, help didn’t feel like capture, and belonging did not require performance.

Many know this ache.

It can be misread as depression, and sometimes depression is present. It can be connected to suicidality, and that must be taken seriously.

It can be trauma, burnout, isolation, sensory overload, chronic shame, school refusal, family rupture, adult exhaustion, the accumulated grief of being misunderstood. But there is also an existential quality to it that risk language does not hold well.

A longing for home can be a longing for a world that has not yet been built around our bodies.

Children may express this in ways that frighten adults.

“I don’t want to be here”, “I wish I was dead”, “I want to go home”, said from inside home. “I want to disappear”, “I hate this life”.

Sometimes the child means immediate danger. Sometimes they mean the current version of life is unliveable.

Adults are called to respond with care, safety and professional support where needed, but we often neglect to listen to the wider message.

What life is this child being asked to remain inside?

Too often, distress is managed without changing the world producing it.

A child says school makes them want to die, and the plan remains attendance.

A teenager says they can’t live with constant pressure, and adults focus on coping strategies.

An adult in burnout says life feels impossible, and the response is a worksheet, a referral, a medication review, a reminder to keep routines.

These may help in some cases. But if the life itself remains a field of demand, the longing for exit may persist.

Longing for home is not always longing for death.

Sometimes it is longing for rest. Longing for belonging. Longing for a body that is not constantly evaluated. Longing for Country, animal kin, online community, a room with the right light, a relationship where silence is not punished, a future not organised around proving capacity.

Sometimes the person wants life very much. They just can’t access the version of life being offered.

This distinction is crucial.

If we only hear and interpret risk, we seek to manage.

If we only hear poetry, we risk missing danger.

We need both.

We need to keep people alive and ask what would make being alive more bearable, more dignified, more theirs. Safety plans are important.

But so are safe lives.

For many of us, home may be found in unusual places.

A game world. A fandom. A bedroom cave. Trees. Birds. Water. A screen lit friendship. A fictional character. A routine no one else understands.

A community of people who finally speak the same nervous system language.

These may be dismissed as escapism, but sometimes they are the first places the person does not feel exiled from themselves.

We might do well to also be careful with the places people find home.

Not uncritical.

Some refuges become prisons. Some online spaces are unsafe. Some withdrawal deepens isolation.

But contempt for refuge is dangerous. If someone has found one place where the body can stop defending, the task is not to rip it away and call that real life. The task is to understand what that place provides and build more of those qualities into the rest of life.

I think the longing for home is part of why I, as a PDAer, can be so sensitive to false belonging.

I know when inclusion is conditional. I know when people say “come as you are” but mean “come as you are as long as your needs don’t change anything”. I know when support is available only if I perform gratitude and progress. I know when relationship is offered with invisible strings.

That kind of belonging can make homesickness worse.

True home is not a place without demands. For me, it’s a place where demands don’t require disappearance. It’s where the body is believed, where no has meaning. Where repair is possible and where difference is not tolerated as an act of generosity, but expected as part of human life.

It’s where I don’t have to earn the right to be here by functioning well enough.

I don’t know whether any PDAers find that fully. Perhaps home is something we build in fragments, or in conversation, in community. Maybe it’s in a patch of Country. A room. A practice. A relationship. A body beginning to trust.

A child who no longer has to become catastrophic to be heard.

When someone says they want to go home, we shouldn’t assume we know what they mean.

We might start practising moving closer toward the ache and asking what kind of world they’ve been missing.

For me, home isn’t a place..it’s an alignment.

It’s a life that’s sustainable and true to who I am at my core.

It’s built around my passions, the people I’m close to and trust, and love. It’s internal safety.

It’s my relationship with myself and my environment, and learning to know and trust what my body is telling me.

It’s my animals. It’s nature. It’s music, singing, dancing, baking, creating, belly laughter.

That’s home.