Homelessness

I have discovered something new about myself. Once I get further away from my home than walking distance, I start feeling unsafe.

I'm currently in Beijing, which forces me to redefine my concept of 'home' slightly. Right now, I suppose it refers to the apartment at the university where I'm staying with my father. But in a certain sense of the word, I feel homeless. I will be moving out of my parents' home once I return from Beijing in October - a home that my parents are currently selling. I am, of course, not truly homeless. My best friend is waiting with an apartment for us to share, and even if by some freak accident it should burn to the ground or be destroyed by Godzilla or our moving plans otherwise thwarted, my parents' new house will have a guestroom for me. I'll always have a bed to sleep in. But a home - I feel less certain on that point.
My aforementioned friend seems to have little qualms about moving. "Home is just where I keep my stuff," she's told me, paraphrasing a well-known saying. I, however, am much more distressed. All Summer, I have been caressing the walls of the apartment I grew up in, taking deep breaths to preserve the smell (it saddens me to say that I cannot now recall what it smells like - it's too much of a 'default' smell, a smell of 'me', but I suppose it soon won't be anymore). The process of tidying up and throwing out and doing practical, moving-preparing things has been an endless cause of stress and discontent for me. The moving boxes that cluttered my room the last week before I left completely drained me of energy. It's time and I'm ready to move out; I've reached that level of maturity and gotten to that stage of my life. I'm excited about it, too, and confident that I'll be fine on my own. And yet it feels like a part of me is dying.

Logically, there should be no problem. My home used to be the apartment shared with my parents; right now it's in Beijing, and soon it will be in a very lovely three-room apartment with my friend. But moving, in several senses of the word, has caused me to reflect on the concept of homes. What is it about them that makes me feel like I have none? I've come to the conclusion that it's about comfort.
Comfort is something that's achieved with difficulty for me. For example, I dislike sleeping with people in the same room, and the task is made near impossible if they happen to be people I'm not close to - and it takes me quite a while to get close to them. Likewise with places: I've always spent most of my time at home, recharging, because being anywhere else is simply draining my energy. Even places I've gone to daily for several years. I don't need a whole hand to count the number of places I feel comfortable enough in to spend an entire day without negative effects. One of those places is my parents' apartment - which is being sold and which I have effectively moved out of now, leaving it behind. Time is the issue here: I will eventually feel at home in my new apartment, but I'm worried about how long it might take. I certainly don't feel quite at home here in Beijing after two weeks, although knowing that my stay is temporary might affect that. And so, I have the nagging feeling of homelessness.

Which brings my back to my opening sentence. Why is homelessness such a scary sensation, despite the fact that I know it's temporary and unlike actually being homeless has no consequences that could plausibly kill me? Why can't I feel comfortable anywhere else? Perhaps the answer is as simple as my being overly sensitive to things like noise and changes in routine, but a quote I stumbled upon opens up the question a bit:

[P]laces like homes can trigger self-reflection, thoughts about who someone is or used to be or who they might become.

Maybe it's the need for this - knowing who I am and being able to reflect on that. As implied before, I'm moving in several senses of the word, not just geographically. Soon I'll be entering (or trying to at least) the workforce, and then I will start university. I'll be on equal standing with the only other person in my household, with a lot more responsibilities than so far. I'm becoming a real adult. This is confusing. So I desire some kind of steady ground to plant my feet on while figuring out what all this means.

Perhaps I will manage to hold on until I feel at home again - or perhaps I will find this steady ground in something else. Time will tell. More on that once I discover it.

On Writing Essays

I don’t exactly consider myself an essayist. A writer; yes. An author; certainly. My heart lies with fiction, as it always has. So the fact that I am now posting my very first entry on a blog meant for hosting my essays is somewhat surprising to me. I’ve had blogs before, of varying degrees of sombreness, but the amount of effort put into the entries there has been limited. I certainly didn’t pay too close attention to the structure and flow of most of them, which I feel are requirements for really having ‘worked’ on a piece of writing. I’ve always made more of an effort when writing fiction, but when a friend of mine started referring to certain longer text posts on tumblr as ‘essays’, it made me think. I’ve written plenty of essays in school, but I never really considered the possibility of writing them for myself. Would there be something for me to gain, personally? Perhaps other people would find them interesting to read, but I’m honestly not too concerned about that possibility. There are countless of essays out there on the internet, hiding mine away from the public would be no big loss. But perhaps writing – and posting – essays of my own could benefit me as a person.

I’m both new and experienced at writing essays. New in the sense that the very one you’re reading now is among the first to be posted publicly. Experienced because I’ve already written quite a few essays over the course of my education. Those essays haven’t been limited to just one genre, either; there have been analytical ones, personal ones, even a few political ones. I’ve gotten good grades for them, too. I have no intention of fooling myself, though. I know that the thirty-five essays (yes, I just went back and counted them. I just graduated and I’m not done celebrating) that I’ve written during my three years in secondary school mean squat in real life. They’re unlikely to be taken seriously by any reader except my teachers when they were grading them, and they’re probably not very indicative of me as a writer – or a person. They have been good practice, and I am without doubt a much better writer today than I was at the age of sixteen, in more ways than one. But by the end of the day, they have been written with a set of arbitrary goals in mind: A (typically unreasonably small) word count, requirements for theme or analysis that weren’t always particularly interesting, and, of course, the goal of getting a good grade. Was I ever given the choice between experimenting and playing it safe in my essays, I usually chose the latter. Either because I didn’t want to risk my 12, or because the subject wasn’t sufficiently interesting, or sometimes out of laziness – I had other homework to do, after all. It’s not that I never wrote anything interesting in school. I did get to write a twenty-page paper on the influence of Old Norse on Old English, which was what really piqued my interest in linguistics, the field of study I hope to pursue in the future. But my lack of experimentation in the writing I did for school can sometimes seem like bit of a waste. Looking at all thirty-five essays, plus the odd pieces of fiction I got to hand in, it’s a small percentage of them that I can look back on with any particular emotion.

Interestingly enough, the assignments I did in primary school might be a better candidate. They allowed for more experimenting, both because the grades didn’t have much of an influence on anything, and besides, you’d get full points just for being a decent speller. And experiment I did. I’ve been looking through my old writing the past few weeks; I always seem to do whenever the school year is about to end. Most of the texts I wrote back in primary school are … not good. That’s not exactly surprising considering I wrote them in my early teens, but once I get past the painfully purple prose and awkward punctuation and naïve attempts at words of wisdom, I see that they’re not that bad, either. I even feel that there’s a sort of intensity, a rapidness to them that my writing lacks today and I want to rediscover, maybe sans the extensive use of adjectives. And I definitely look back on these with fond eyes and a slight ache in my chest. I poured my heart and soul into these things. They were the heart and soul of an immature and somewhat pretentious child, and every other sentence I want to cringe, shake my head and go, “Oh, you were so wrong” (I’ll likely to the same in five years while reading what I’m writing now). But despite it all, I see myself growing and developing in those texts. I see myself exploring. I still grow and I still explore, but the fact that I was handing my writing over to an adult to read seems to have added some significance. Paradoxically, it even seems to have added a little courage; I might have been slightly more honest in my old essays than I would have been otherwise. My teacher was too prudent to comment in-depth on what I wrote, but I can’t help but wonder what she must have been thinking. In the eighth grade, I confessed my first love to her in a letter addressed to a classmate. A year later, I came out as I-don’t-really-know-what-but-definitely-not-straight in an essay involving smells, sounds, and the bodies of myself, a crush, and my parents floating among one another on a metaphysical plane in total darkness. Occasionally I’d throw all rules and restraints to the wind and burden my poor teacher with much more than what she was probably getting paid for, such as when I handed in a twenty-one-page novella when she had asked us to write “at least one and a half page”. Or, for our ninth-grade project, a total of 64 pages, forty of which were another novella taking place in an allegorical combination of Germany and the Soviet Union. “Next step is to learn how to limit yourself,” she told me repeatedly, but I never really followed up on that advice. I think I wanted to make the most of the time I had, on some level already having predicted the choice between good grades and experimentation I would have to make in secondary school.

Which brings me here. Secondary school is over (almost – I’m actually writing this while taking a break from studying for my exams). I won’t enrol in university for another year, and until then, I have total creative control over my own writing. The obvious question is what I want to do with it. That is what I hope this blog will help me find out. This first entry has been more of a stream-of-consciousness than a proper essay, I feel, which might not be the best way to start it all off. On the other hand, that fact might help emphasize the theme of experimentation that somehow snuck into this piece. As well as highlight how much I still have to learn. And I have to start somewhere.

So I’ll start here.