#174: Home?

It’s not a place, a person, or a picket fence. It’s something we shape ourselves.

My book tour travels over the last month got me thinking a lot about home.

What home is. What home means to me. The times I’ve felt most at home. And the least.

It was mid-tour and there I sat, overthinking my book talk in a few hours. I was chewing my nails and staring out the plate glass window of Petite Lou Brasserie when my friend Rebecca came into view. She was navigating the Thunderdome of Amsterdam’s bike lanes, car lanes, pedestrians, delivery trucks, and dogs, which the Dutch can do in their sleep.

Rebecca is not Dutch.

I clutched my pearls as I watched her zigzag across the street, then disappear. In the ten seconds she was out of my sight, Apple Maps having sent her to the back entrance rather than the front, my vision blurred, expecting the worst. When she suddenly reappeared, I leaped out of my seat and pulled her in for a hug.

I haven’t known Rebecca for even a year. But catching up with her feels like I’ve been doing it for a lifetime. I not only forgot about my book talk anxiety, I found myself naturally sharing the types of intimate details that only emerge when your body feels that special sauce of camaraderie, acceptance, and validation.

I could tell Rebecca was having a similar experience, because she shared something insane:

“You know, I have not been here before, but Amsterdam feels like home.”

Not only did I NOT scoff at the factual lunacy of her statement, I actually felt a bloom of recognition in my chest.

Wow… Me too…???

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The traditional definitions of home have never really resonated for me.

When I was a kid, Dad was always taking new opportunities at different steel mills, so we moved house when I was 8, then 10, then 12. Mom made each house feel homey, but even in those days I never got too attached to my front-yard-facing bedroom, or my back-yard facing bedroom, or the bedroom I shared with my sister. Home was where my family was, and it was a movable thing.

Mike and I exhibited a similar kind of restlessness, circling Northern Virginia like a cat bedding down for nap. As our family grew and our needs changed, the postage stamp yard in Old Town gave way to a tricycle-friendly driveway in Reston. When the kids switched schools and we needed to be closer to DC, a McLean zipcode graced our return address. We loved our homes, and Mike decorated them to the nines, but they were serving a need: space to grow, location to optimize. Our togetherness was what mattered most.

The unspoken belief I carried during this season was home is family.

But then Mike died. I became the solo breadwinner, and ended up traveling. A lot.

Work was always the driver, but I took advantage of the transatlantic flights to regularly visit a place where Mike and I had many fond memories: London. A few times a year I’d route through Heathrow from Frankfurt, Dubai, Kuwait, and grab a night or two in the city. But as the years went on and the flights continued, I was less drawn to our old haunts, and more to finding my new favorites. A hip hotel with a great cafe, watching Wimbledon on the jumbotron in a crowd of Brits, getting lost in the stacks of tiny bookstores.

Now I randomly walk around corners in London, and stumble into a memory from 30 years ago, 15 years ago, 3 years ago. The cobblestone streets and regular tube stops, wet and cold as they often are, feel like my family. In London I realized that I didn’t have to just find the cozy sense of recognition and comfort around people I loved. I could find comfort in myself, reflected back to me through a place I’ve known and loved for years.

So even though no one was there to meet me and my rollerbag when I popped out at Paddington station, I started to feel that homey relief whenever I smelled the hot air rushing through the underground.

My definition of home had evolved yet again, probably closer to how most people define it: a place where it’s easy to be yourself.

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Then I arrived in Amsterdam.

Yes, I was awed by the architecture, the uncurtained windows allowing a glimpse into Dutchie life, the houseboats worthy of Frank Lloyd Wright (or Popeye the Sailor Man), the bitterballen burning my tongue, the scarved inhabitants giving posh an entirely new meaning. But I’d only been there once before, one year ago. And my friendships with Alice, Nicoline, and Hannah, Dutch natives and transplants, are strong but young. In other words, by either of my previous definitions, Amsterdam should not feel like home. The city itself, beautiful as it is, doesn’t hold the recognition I’ve come to believe is a prereq for that cozy acquaintance.

But I think all that was enough to soften me up for the main acts of Amsterdam:

I shared every meal with one or more of those new friends. The caffeine lunch I had with Rebecca. The sauna-and-sea afternoon with Alice and Nic. The springtime canal walk with Hannah. Flat whites and easy conversation with Mindy. Dinner with my publisher Miranda and editor Jess. Espresso martinis with Leona and her family. And the cherry on top: a lunch I hosted with everyone who lives in, or came to, town.

These are a different type of friendship than I was used to back when I met almost everyone through work or the kids; they aren’t expecting me to be anything other than what I am. And so I can be more me: sometimes nervous, sometimes excited, more and more vulnerable, occasionally giddily proud, all of it.

And then there were the book events, which I had two of, back-to-back. I’ve discovered that I’m always nervous right before the event, but once the crowd quiets (except for that tiny heckler last time) and expectant eyes turn to me, I love it. Why? Because, finally, I get to be the flesh-and-blood version of me, the firehose-of-energy me, the almost levitating me. The version of me I’ve worked towards for the last three years: an advocate for vibrant living after loss. That’s me, Sue Deagle, book-recommending, newsletter-writing, Do Loss authoring, living and breathing my purpose on this planet. Alive, awake, participatory and engaged.

Wow, it’s so good to do more than feel like her internally, silently, while I’m typing away on my iPad. Instead, I’ve been interacting as her, being seen as her.

The outside matches the inside.

I can feel hard-ass Sue fighting the sentimentality of this, but what I found in Amsterdam was a feeling of being fully myself, while surrounded by people who welcomed that self, which my body recognizes as one word: “home”.

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Family. An international city where I find it easy to breathe. Friends who cheer me on as I become more myself.

None of these are a white picket fence: the permanent, physical place where we just assume home should be.

And yet.

All of them are home in the sense that, when I’m there I feel like a plant in warm light, happily drinking in the nourishment. They’re the environments I want to return to when I’m worn out by the world, ready to curl up, relax, and receive. “Home is where the heart is” is cute and catchy, don’t get me wrong. But for me, home is where I find myself regularly, easily filled. Home is low effort, high reward. Home is refuge.

This is one of those realizations that makes me want to jump up and down. Because it punches one of my favorite buttons extra hard: FREEDOM. It means that home isn’t something that either you have or you’ve lost. It’s something you get to seek, recognize, or straight-up build. It all starts with noticing when you feel at ease, when you feel nourished, and when you feel like yourself.

When we default to the cookie-cutter definition of something, we flatten out our own experiences like cardboard boxes headed for the recycling bin. We stop paying attention to what we’re actually feeling, believing we don’t have to do any deep looking, because the dictionary’s already given us the description. And so we miss chances to be inquisitive about and creative with our own experience. We accept what is given to us, even if it doesn’t quite fit. (That would be like me insisting Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania was still my home.)

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On my last day in Amsterdam, my brain was the equivalent of TV static as I wandered the streets alone. All the energy and ideas, the nerves and excitement, the sheer volume of conversation had put me on tilt. Now all I could take in were the visuals: the giant Stroopwafels, the tourists lingering in alleyways with paper boats filled with fries, the plush scarves, the storefront windows filled with everything from rubber duckies to space cookies to wooden tulips.

Then, one particular storefront sliced through my brain fog. Wait, I recognized this display: beautiful painted tiles. Hannah had given me a tiny one with a delicate painting of Amsterdam when I visited her here last year. My eyes scanned the tiles in the window until one lassoed me in: a delicate orange door, a climbing green plant, a welcome mat striped with blue, and a little bird perched on a sign that simply read: home.

I stepped into the store, the jangling of its bell announcing my arrival. Five minutes later, I stepped back out to those same tinkling tones, my bubble-wrapped totem secured in my tote.

To all the places we call home,

P.S. I’ve made another video for the Loss Canon: The Books that Got Me Through. If you’re into books and/or videos, you can watch it right here: