lost sense of home

Have you ever felt like you don't have a sense of where home is anymore? Lots of places look familiar but none is familiar enough to be "home" anymore?

Yes!!

Then you return to the place you left from, home, only to find it has changed so much that you no longer feel "at home" there!!!

Solution, pick a place you really liked & felt comfortable in, move there & make it your new HOME!!!!

At least that's what I'm doing in El Salvador!

I've got no sense of home. I've lived in Michigan for twelve years and it's never felt like home. My first extended trip was the closest thing I ever felt. I leave on Monday on a one-way ticket and I'm not looking back. Maybe I'll find a place to call home out there.

Or maybe, just maybe, the road is home for me. Who knows?

Well, Michigan. i mean let's get real. Who would ever call Michigan home? never been there but a colleageu of mine was posted to Detroit 35 years ago, back when it actually had some decent car business going on and he said it was like the"armpit of the world"

so good luck, just don't stick around a dog hole 12 years to figure it out next time. We don't live forever you know.

God help me I'm laughing at my own jokes now, but llving in a dog hole reminds me of the time i was out coyote hunting with a friend of mine and we go into this hollow in the rolling wheat fields of the palouse to a little town called Colfax and we're buying some snacks and this girls is checking our stuff out of the cash register and i ask her if she lived "in this doghole for long" and she says "o no, just 3 years i used to live in Priest lake Idaho, they have good walley there" and my friend is behind me and he just about split a gut laughing about the whole scene, my deadpan question and the innocent wide eyed response of the poor nitwit register girl. I just hope she doesn't take too long to wake up.

[quote="zoomcharlieb"]Well, Michigan. i mean let's get real. Who would ever call Michigan home? never been there but a colleageu of mine was posted to Detroit 35 years ago, back when it actually had some decent car business going on and he said it was like the"armpit of the world"


Personally I would pick Michigan over Washington any day of the week & I have been to both.

Don't really see much difference between Detroit & Seattle where one can't even find anything to eat in the Amtrak station while waiting for the connecting bus to Vancouver which is an hour late!

Detroit is a pimple. The rest of Michigan is quite rural, and can be quite pretty. It's big for hunters, fishermen, nature hikers, and people who like beaches and water. Some tourist once stopped and asked me, "Excuse me, do you know which way to the ocean?" Apparently the Great Lakes are oceans now, go figure. I wouldn't go so far as to call Michigan an armpit.

But our economic issues are staggering. We (used to) have the auto industry and that employed people all over the state. Our other big one is tourism, and guess how that's going? Tourist-based businesses have been very slow the last couple of years, and anyways we only get that money for about six weeks in the summer, when the weather is actually nice. In the winter we get a little bit of snow-related business like skiing and snowmibiling and icefishing, but not enough. So here we are, no cars, no tourists, and everyone making fun of Detroit. Haha. although I did go to a concert in a suburb of Detroit one time and it was actually really really nice. And I just got back from a road trip up to the Upper Peninsula, and wow. It's a different world up there. It's the small-town America that has disappeared everywhere else. Small diners, one watering-hole towns with a general store and not a touch of irony, kitsch, that "Look at us tourists! We're such a cute little example of small-town America!" I kind of loved it. I hope it doesn't vanish anytime soon.

Erm, anyways. Carry on with the conversation, swear I'm done now. I just wanted to say that Michigan might not feel like home, but as things go where I live(d) isn't such a bad place. Other than us being Michael Moore's bitch. But that's another story.

Oh btw, I'm only 19 so I reckon sticking around here for twelve years before I figured it out isn't so bad. I'm well aware we don't live forever. I'm on a one-way to Romania in the morning, Charlie.

KnottyNikki-

I believe the road is home for me. Ever since I was little, I always wanted to move. I think reading the Little House on the Prairie books too many times as a kid may have gotten to me

And I don't know if I'll ever find "home". And that's OK with me, because I'm sure as hell going to try to find it, and if that means traveling the globe, so be it.

I miss my home,my family.Home is important for me,maybe not for you

part of the reason i love travelling is because i always have a home to go back to. i also have travelling to look forward to when i'm at home.

It's not that home isn't important for me. I just don't have any place that feels like home. I am homeless.

The closest I ever feel like I have a home is when I'm in Budapest.

Losing the feeling of having a home is a fantastic feeling for me. Everywhere kinda feels like home when i'm there, even if its only a few days. Getting back to your hostel, after a day treking around some obscure city in China, feels like going "home". It's not home, but everywhere is kinda home when you're travelling.

on_ancient_road wrote:Have you ever felt like you don't have a sense of where home is anymore? Lots of places look familiar but none is familiar enough to be "home" anymore?

Your question had me dig through my journals to find this — I think we all may have felt this way once or twice — which I wrote to myself in September of 2001 while in Bangkok:

You move. You move without remembering the ones you’ve left. Without a tether, without an anchor to your bed back home. You move. You have no need for memories. You have the deepest need for maps. In the overstuffed drawers of travel agencies you live a post-modern epic where nothing happens This is how you live—a pause punishable by death. With the urgency of instinct, you move against the currents of the day. Your blood thirsting for oxygen. You move. You move without remembering the ones you’ve left. Memories of home itching like a phantom limb. You move.

I thought it summed up my feelings then — kind of homeless, just follow 9/11, etc. Check out the post here.