You Can't Go Home Again, and Yet...

Thomas Wolfe, famously, told us that we can't go home again. It's true, as a traveler, that you can't - not really - because home is a place inside of you in connection (self-in-context) with the outside and you have changed. We all are changed by being somewhere else, and change those places too, in little ways or big.

But the fact of it is that sometimes home is hauntingly, over-familiarly familiar. It is the same. And you are different. Or perhaps it changes and in some ways you realize that the things that stay the same are actually the things you thought definitely would change - and thus, the immutables in the world, the rock that is carved by water, is not what you thought. That, in itself, is a trip - both in the sense of journey and the sense of a chemical brain reaction that takes you somewhere and leaves you there, and perhaps never brings you back.

The matter here of course, is that both elements have changed, and some things that seemed like they would never shift have, and others, only a little, and some, maybe not at all, and so we are left with a feeling of being completely disjointed and out of place. And that is how I have been feeling for this past month, as I've returned to the place where I started - physically - and have had to revisit the places I've been - mentally - in these spaces. When you are haunted by the ghosts of your past selves it is not as comforting as you might have hoped.

On my journey abroad I came to some great, historical revelations. I don't know if perhaps I built them or perhaps I traveled to them, but I came upon them, and they are certainly there now, in my mind's eyes, they are the temples that keep me centered around the navel of my world I suppose. There they sit, quite finished, detailed, pretty much in tact. And they tell me that we are, most of us, coming from the same place, and following the same intentions, the same star in the sky if you will. And that our roads toward that star, or our ability to get to it, are not always the same.

This is what has brought me home inside, that is, brought me back to peace with my family. The realization and the desire to work toward understanding about the idea that we are working toward and desiring the same goals. We want the same thing! We want Tavia to be well, we want her to have a full life, we want her to be in a safe and happy place. We want to have relationships with one another and be connected and feel at ease. The how to do this is what has been tripping us up, and it is not an easy answer, because it takes all of us meeting somewhere, not just one of us doing a linear action. It really takes a circle, not an arrow. It doesn't matter if therapy would have been/would be a good option, because Tavia put her trust in people who would not choose this option for her, and perhaps that was because she didn't want them to. She made decisions and was a part of this process too. Which means, of course, that the mentally ill are not objects but deciders, and ones who are permitted to make their own mistakes, to embrace their own decisions. Sometimes it's wonderful to be home, and sometimes it's quite frighteningly familiar, bringing the same fears and terrors, insecurities, desires that you thought you had left behind on your chronological path toward the end of yourself. But that's just not how it works.

And so. And so here we are, and I am home again. Or am I? It seems like another version of something, because I am another version of myself, or another valence has been added to me, like a cognizance of reality that has deepened, and so I realize as I think about the next step that not only has home become another place, but the same, so I have become another person, but return to embrace the one before.