how to build a home inside of yourself

reflections on creating space for my wholeness

I have always been a very all or nothing person. It has always been my impulse to do everything very intensely, feel every emotion in its entirety, with every part of my being or not at all. I love people with all their curves and edges, swim in their sorrow and dance in their joy. I cried the first time I ever tasted a burrito because I couldn’t believe it was so good. When I was six and had my first crush on a boy I shaped the word ‘love’ out of clay and gave it to him. It has always felt very natural to me to love in this way, to receive the world with eyes and arms wide open, ready to hold every last bit of it and let my responses pour out of me like an overflowing river into a waterfall.

The older I got the more I learnt that when we are open to everything it becomes difficult to choose what makes a home inside of us. Before we have learnt to lock the doors and put bars over the windows we are housing other people’s pain as if it is our own. We hold all that the world has no space to carry until it seeps into every cell, until its heaviness makes a home out of our tired bones, until our body no longer feels like our own but rather a bit like memory foam - still holding the outline of those who have made an imprint on our lives. We become moulded like a piece of clay in the hands of life, collapsing under the pressure of over-eager fingers, losing parts of ourselves to those that carve away at our steadiness.

But eventually there will come a day when we realise just how much we have been holding that was never meant to be ours. For me, that was the day someone broke my heart for the first time. I felt it crack open, its insides pouring out and flooding every part of me, water crashing against the gates of my skin, begging to be let out. There was no room in my body to hold it safely, no quiet, cozy fireplace to sit in front of and unravel this feeling, no soft bed to rest in, no gardens of my own to walk myself through. All the space inside of me had been filled with fragments of other people’s lives. I was suddenly overwhelmed with this feeling that my body was something foreign to me, a place for others to live and eat and laugh and rest and without them it felt empty, abandoned even. I had used the blueprint of the spaces around me in order to decorate a home inside myself. My father’s rage had become a flame that roared so intensely that my ears became accustomed to the sound of the fire alarm. My mothers tolerance a beautiful knitted blanket shoved over it, burning holes all the way through. I was a house filled with heirlooms gifted to me when I was too young to accept them consciously - all the pain that those who had come before me had no place for.

Subconsciously I knew how cluttered it felt. I had been planting myself in another’s soil over and over until my roots were ripped out with a ferocity that left me floating in the space between versions of myself. I no longer had the safety of someone else’s arms, the rise and fall of another chest to sync up my breathing with. I wanted to return home to myself but everywhere I looked was a broken window, a muddy pair of footprints, reminders of the careless ways others had treated my body because I had welcomed them into it as if it was theirs.

And so I got to work decluttering. I let myself be angry at all the mess that had been dragged in without my consent. I threw away the clothes that had no room for all of me, found an instruction manual on how to make myself as small as possible and shredded every page. I threw out a framed photograph of my shame and found the 10 year old version of me clutching desperately to its edges. I had to pry her fingers off of it and hold her shaking hands into acceptance, then stop my 17 year old self from setting everything on fire. In the corner of my childhood bedroom was a curled up 6 year old staying as silent as possible, scared to move for fear of disrupting the objects that had piled up around her. I walked her outside and we danced hand in hand and played with no worry about whether or not it was safe to do so. Our inner parent was watching us patiently from inside, waiting with open arms to embrace us fully, whispering a gentle “I am so happy you’re home”.

So there I sat, with every age I have ever been in an almost empty house. I looked every version of me in the eyes and saw them for exactly what they were, accepting all the parts of them they had tried to shrink and shove away. I let them cry when they needed to, and scream if it felt good. I played music that they could dance to, taught them how to make a friend of their breath. And when we had made enough of our own mess that it felt like home, we decided to start redecorating.

We built a room for the children to play in, with an obnoxiously large slide and a four story jungle gym. A room for the quieter parts of me, with big open windows and plants hugging the walls and sunlight seeping through the blinds. The bedroom became a sanctuary, a visual representation of all the love inside spilling out and holding me within it. I recently built a room just for dancing, a wide open space vast enough to house all the joy that the body cannot contain. The house is surrounded by gardens that I plant my dreams in, water with consistency and watch them bloom from the kitchen window, where I fold my love into sheets of pasta, spill my joy out into a pan and feed it back to myself. In the heart of my house I have built a steady fireplace to illuminate the space, defrost my trembling hands, remind me that every death is the beginning of a rebirth, everything that burns will once again live.

I am nowhere near finished, the process of constructing a space of safety for myself is lifelong because the process of becoming myself is lifelong. As I change shape, the spaces I hold for myself will change to fit that shape. But I am no longer squeezing myself into others’ spare rooms, folding myself into the smallest version of me to fit inside the crease of someone’s brow, the fold of their elbow, the space between their sentences. I no longer seek a place outside of myself to feel at home because I am deeply at home within myself. I have all the space I need to hold every part of my experience, there is no need to give parts of me to greedy hands in the hopes that they will hold me gently.

I am still that wide eyed girl who looks for love in everything, but my wonder is no longer childlike and naive, it is now wise enough to know that living my life with half of myself for fear of losing all of myself would be to choose a puddle over the entire ocean. In the past my bruised heart built walls around itself to stop itself from dissolving into another’s arms, now I have grounded my heart so deeply within myself that no matter how many hands hold it I know it belongs to me first. From this place of steadiness I have nothing to lose by letting myself be touched by the world, because I know that I am the one who decides how I am shaped by it.

I am slowly learning to open up the doors again. Placing a welcome mat outside the door, letting love in if it promises to clean off its muddy shoes, hang up its coat in the entryway, clean up the spillage that it makes. I am finding the balance between searching for love outside of myself and locking away the love that lives within. I am letting love make a mess with me, not of me ; letting it teach me and not take from me. I have everything I need within the home I have built myself, the light that spills out is an overflow, the light that pours in is a blessing.