Home is where the words are
Hi friend!
How are you? How's life? I've missed you!
June was an absolutely whirlwind month for me where my baby sister got married (!!!), and then immediately after, I moved from an apartment of seven years (!!!) into a new house.
As a result, writing came into almost an absolute standstill. Normally, I would have been itching to get back to it, but I think I'd gotten to a point of the novel where I needed to live a bit of my own life before I wrote the rest.
If the first half of the novel is Judah running away from the idea of home, the second part will be about him finding it. 'Home' is a strange word that way. It has the capacity to be the most freeing while it also has room to become a complicated place. I think that idea of home is so deeply-rooted within all of us, and we all strive to find a home, a place where we belong and where we can exist without judgement. Whether or not we succeed is a different story entirely, and this is but one of many possibilities of a story about someone both having a complicated relationship with the idea of home and also still trying to find it.
I don't think I've been equipped to write a story about home until... well, now. It's taken me all of 30 years to figure out how to define that word for myself, after being uprooted many times, and then it's taken me a couple more years to take that idea and manifest it into a reality. And oddly enough, I needed Judah to get to that place before me in order to give myself permission to make a home that is correct for me.
Writing has always configured into my idea of feeling home in one form or another. I'm warming back up to it after a long stretch, only to find myself more anchored than I've ever been. That, I think, is the beauty of home -- bringing me peace while allowing me to pursue my dreams from a place of absolute calm and assurance. And peace and calm are really difficult to come by these days, what with the noisy, chaotic world outside.
So this is where I am right now, in the process of making a space that will work for my future self. I don't know whether I'll go back to writing the same way as before, whether I will tweak the process a little, or if I will have a vastly different habit of it, but I do know that writing will happen in some capacity in the near future.
And I can't wait.
Until next month!
Much love,
Yasi