30 Days of Radical Honesty Journalling Challenge – Day 12: What Does “Home” Mean To Me, And How Has That Changed Over The Years?

I once wrote, “I want to go home, but I am home.”

I was eleven. Just a child. But already something in me had cracked wide open. I found that line again recently, scrawled in pencil in the corner of a weathered notebook, its edges curled like the corners of a long-held sorrow. And I remembered, instantly, what it felt like to write it. The disorientation. The quiet ache. The desolation of living inside a life that felt more like exile than safety. I didn’t know where to go. There was nowhere soft to land.

And what devastates me, even now, is knowing how young I was when I learned that comfort could be absent. That care could be conditional. That even the people who were supposed to hold me could leave me feeling weightless in the worst way—adrift, unmoored, untethered.

There was no one to talk to about it. No one to say, you’re not crazy for feeling this lost. So I wrote it down. Over and over. “I want to go home, but I am home.” And I meant it. With everything in me. It wasn’t poetry then. It was a scream I didn’t yet know how to make with my mouth.

For a long time, I stopped hoping for comfort. It felt like too much to ask. Like asking for spring when winter had frozen my bones. Instead, I hoped for a shimmer. A glint. Just something small to chase in the dark. But I didn’t believe it would ever come.

And then, somehow, she arrived.

Samantha. My cat. My angel. My lifeline. She was not just a pet. She was proof. That love could exist in the quiet. That something soft and warm could curl up beside you and not ask you to be anything other than exactly who you were. She didn’t speak, but she didn’t need to. Her presence was louder than any promise. She was love, made manifest in a thousand tiny, beautiful ways.

Because of her, I held on. Not because I believed in magic. But because she was magic.

And somewhere along the line, I stopped searching for home and started building it.

It didn’t happen all at once. It happened in slow, quiet increments. In safety. In love. In the way another heart can move toward yours without warning and suddenly you’re not alone in the storm anymore. My heart found his—my partner, my husband, the one who carries me forward and steadies me when I falter. And mine burrowed into his. We are the foundation now. Conjoined twin souls, pulsing with purpose.

We build goodness together. With our hands, our hearts, our work. We build a home that is felt more than seen—a home where there is peace and permission, where our light radiates outward like a Care Bear Stare. Where our love becomes the change we want to see. Where every piece of our journey points not to what we survived, but to what we created.

I used to think home was a place.

Now I know better.

Home is a feeling. Home is a person. Home is a life you build from scratch, one tender moment at a time.

Home is the love that stayed.

Peace, Love, and Inspiration,
~Britt Wolfe💚