“Are you going home"?”

A question that has always got me thinking, now more than ever, is, “are you going home?” I know it sounds like a silly and simple question to answer, but it has been a strange and challenging question for about the last six years. I was lucky enough to grow up in the same town and same house throughout my childhood, so I didn’t have to move around a lot and get used to new spaces. My first time moving out was for college, and since then, I’ve been struggling to find a definition for what makes a home. That might sound silly, and you might be thinking, “come on, Julia, a home is just where you live.” It should be that simple, right? But that thought process just hasn’t worked for me, and I still struggle with answering the question, “are you going home.” I’ve found myself calling four different places my home over the years, and I still would call each of them a piece of my home. I have four maps of each of them over my bed at my current “home” in Los Angeles, and it gives me a sense of comfort and a reminder of where my journey has taken me.

First of all, there is my hometown of Portola Hills, the neighborhood I grew up in and lived my first eighteen years of life. I have the strongest connection to this space in that way. I know every street in that neighborhood and couldn’t possibly get lost there. Every corner has some kind of personal memory to it from going door to door selling girl scout cookies to walking to elementary school every morning. It’s a very suburban neighborhood with cookie-cutter homes and friendly neighbors. We called in the Portola Hills bubble in high school because there was just a sense of safety and comfort in the community. I grew up in the same house for all eighteen years. The most significant change I had to deal with was moving one bedroom over when my brother wasn’t a baby anymore. It’s a space I will always feel at home in and would be upset if it ever went away. My parents are still there, and I’m always happy to go back. I think the fact that my family is still there is what makes me feel the most inclined to call this space home. Home is where the heart is, right? That’s the most cliched idea to say that wherever my family is is what will feel like home to me, but I do find some truth to it.

The first time I moved out was for college. I went to the University of Redlands, which was only about two hours away from my hometown. I wasn’t someone who wanted to move across the country to get as far away from my parents as possible, but at the same time, I was ready to get out there and start living on my own. Redlands is a small college town. It’s on the way to in the middle of nowhere, California, in the inland empire. Redlands is known for its citrus groves and small-town personality. It has a picture-perfect main street lined with small businesses, antique shops, and specialty restaurants. Redlands was the first place where I found my spots around the city. There was a coffee shop downtown that my friends and I would go to study practically every day and the weekly night market where we would buy local produce and eat way too many mini cinnamon donuts. There is nothing particularly exciting about the city itself, but I grew to love it because of the memories made in certain places and the creative ways we found to make the most of our time there. Redlands was the first place I was able to make a home for myself and figure out the way I wanted to live. I am very appreciative of my time spent there and get excited to go back.

About halfway through college, I studied abroad in Paris. I blogged extensively about that experience, and all of those posts are in my blog archives. I’m sorry, but I am 100% that obnoxiously cliche person who will go on and on about how important my abroad experience was to me. I also rarely say I studied in Paris, but that I lived in Paris. Before I went, I had never left the country before. No one in my family had ever left the country apart from trips to Mexico, which, if you live in Southern California, is barely anything. This fact didn’t hit me until I got out of the taxi in Paris and found myself standing in front of this huge apartment building, meeting the family I was going to be staying with for the next five months. I was terrified and called my mom, asking if I could come back home. I thought I was going to hate being in this foreign country, where I barely spoke the language and would spend the next five months, locking myself in my tiny little Chambre de bonne. Luckily after about a week and a half, I figured out how to make the experience work for me, and I ended up leaving feeling like Paris was another home to me. I spent a lot of time alone, not because I didn’t make any friends or that I was a sad antisocial person, but because I was in control of my own experience. I moved at my own pace and explored the places I wanted to. That slow and in-depth exploration is what made me fall in love with the city. I spent most of my time outside of classes just walking around different neighborhoods or sitting in local coffee shops and cafes journaling. I would pretty much only go back to my room to sleep. Areas in the city just became so familiar to me because I was out every day. By the end of my experience, Paris felt like a new home, and I was already looking forward to when I would get to come back to this now familiar place.

Flash forward a couple of years, and I was about a year out of college. I had already moved back home, not having a plan yet or the financial means to live independently straight out of college, but was starting to get antsy living out of my high school bedroom. I loved being with my parents, but I was ready to see what this next chapter of life had for me. My lifelong best friend was in the same boat as me, and one day we just said we should move out together. We found a place, and suddenly we were living in Hollywood. I strongly dislike LA, but that’s where the work is, so it had to happen eventually. It didn’t feel like home at first, other than the fact that it was where all my stuff was. I would always refer to our place as “the apartment,” not home. I was struggling to find work and was feeling pretty discouraged about the entire decision and was starting to consider moving back “home.” Eventually, I got the perfect job that I didn’t even know I was looking for, and my perspective started changing. My roommate and I worked hard to decorate and make our little space feel like a home that we would be excited to come back to and spend time. I was working 12 hour days, but I felt excited to go home to a space that was entirely mine. I’m still not in love with LA, but I do like my little space in the city. Now we just signed another year lease for this apartment, which means this is the first place in the last six years that I get to spend more than a year in which feels pretty good.

Now that most of us are abiding by this “safer at home” order, living at home is looking a lot different. That’s when I started hearing this question a lot more often, wondering whether I should stay at my apartment in Hollywood or go back to stay at my parents in Portola Hills. I decided to stay at the apartment because it was the most practical decision and doesn’t involve me having to pack everything up to drive back to OC. It’s just the whole “safer at home” phrase that got me thinking about this topic.

All that said, what is a home? I think what I’ve found from my experiences is that a home is a place where you can feel safe and comfortable. I’m lucky that I’ve found comfort in many different places over the last few years and still can call each of them a home in a sense. I have two physical places I can call home both here in Hollywood and back in Portola Hills at my parent’s house. Even though I don’t have a physical residence in Redlands or Paris, there are still so many areas in each of those cities that I find comfort in and make me feel at home when I’m there. I guess I don’t have an answer to the question, “are you going home?” but I am happy with that. Home can be defined differently to each person, and I am thankful for the way I’ve made the word mean something to me.

Love,
Julia Carrington