On Being Here and on Going Home, Essay Example

Home for me is far away. It is not in this state, not even in this country. This is the first time home has ever been this far away. Over the last several months, the idea of home, what it is, where it is, and what it means to go back, have all been very real and pressing issues to me. Joan Didion’s essay, “On Going Home,” speaks to many of the same questions I have been struggling with and learning from over the last few months.

I, like Didion, “had, by all objective accounts, a “normal” and “happy” family situation” (Didion, On Going Home). But when I get off the phone with my family I have a vey similar experience to her; I feel the same “nameless anxiety color[ing] the emotional distance between me and the place I call home” (Didion). That anxiety does not feel like it is caused by my home or my family, and not even by the new place that I am in now, but by the “emotional distance” between the two (Didion). The distance between myself and my home has taught me much about what home means to me. It seems that only through experiencing this distance, I have been able to gain perspective about what home means, and how it is part of who I am.

First and foremost, the distance between self and home that I am experiencing has taught me how much I take for granted in the familiar and everyday experience of being home. I’m not trying to “be all gushy,” but it seems like one never even notices something that is always present until it is gone. Being away from home for the first time is a lot like being underwater for the first time; it is easy to take air for granted until you dive into a place where it is absent. Although it is true, I have come to appreciate my parents more since I’ve been away from home, I think the more interesting thing I have learned along these lines has to do with what and how we see. All of the commonplace details and nuances of where I grew up only ever came into focus after I left. It’s a strange thing to think that we can only ever see a thing in great detail once we leave it. This insight leads me to think that we might only know home in returning to it, after a long absence.

The idea of return is also something that Didion touches on. “The question of whether or not you could go home again,” Didion writes, “was a very real part of the sentimental and largely literary baggage with which we left home.” If I had read that passage before coming here, I do not think I would have understood it. Now though, it seems like I do. As I said before, I feel like I see my home in a different way, now that I have been apart from it. So, in going back home, I cannot help but think that it will seem different to me. Thus, there is a very real way in which going home again is impossible; I can definitely go back, but what I will go back to will be different to me than what I came from. With this realization comes a certain feeling of homelessness, and homelessness feels like independence.

The idea that I am, in some sense, without a home, makes me feel like I have the capacity to be creative with my own identity. I am definitely more independent than before in the sense that I live in a dorm, I have to make sure I get up and get to class without my parents’ help and so on. However, in a deeper sense, in being away from home, I feel that I have the ability to change who I am and become whatever I want to be.  Feeling like I am without home means I am not beholden to who I was in the past, which means I can be whoever I want to be in the present.

In sum, although I miss my home, my family and my friends very much, I am happy I am here. Being away from home has made me not only appreciate home in a way that I did not before, but also made me understand home in a way that I could not have before. Being away from home has also given me the ability to work on myself in ways that were impossible before I left.  Now that I am away from home, I feel like I can make changes in myself, the way I interact with and am seen by others, and become whoever I want to be.  Being away from home has given me the opportunity to carve out a new place for myself, while being able to see my old place in a new light.