Home is other people

The inwardness and outwardness of being a human loving other humans

The grassy hillside in the centre of campus just below the clocktower is one of the places that feels familiar to me now. I’m laying on my back, arms crossed over myself—partially to block the sun from my eyes, and partially as an embrace.

In deep covid, Astrid and I used to run to each other’s houses or to the same city park, spend a little time stretching and talking together, and then run home. Once, her hippie aunt led us through a yoga practice on Zoom, and she told us to lay on our backs with arms stretched out long and crossed over the heart. It was cold outside, but as I breathed a heat built in the centre of my chest, warming me from the inside out, and I could feel my slow, deep heartbeat in every part of me. My body remembers that winter, and sometimes I still unconsciously make this pose when I lay down.

The girl sitting behind me is speaking German on the phone, and I close my eyes and lose myself in the familiar lilt. I never get to hear my second first language anymore, except in pieces of conversations overheard between passing strangers, and it sounds like childhood, like the home I can never return to. For a few minutes, another part of my brain wakes up. The girl is speaking too softly and quickly for me to understand most of what she’s saying, but I know she’s talking about “Heim,” about home. I smile at the way she, like all young people, scatters bits of English through her sentences: “Der einziger Weg ist patience,” she says, laughing. Patience is the only way. Maybe she’s adjusting to a new life here, just like I am.

I’m thinking about the moment in Past Lives (which I finally watched last weekend and definitely recommend—thanks Mai!) when Arthur tells Nora that she switches to Korean when she talks her in sleep. He’s afraid of the impenetrability of her dreams and the necessary distance this creates between them. “There’s a place inside you where I can’t go,” he says.

I cherish the idea that I could visit a place inside this stranger that is closed to most of rest of the world, even if I can’t fully understand.

Once I asked my dad, who moved from Germany to Canada as a young man, which language he thinks in. He told me that after all this time, he thinks mostly in English. I should have asked him which language he dreams in, too.

Dad, is it lonely to be married to someone who can’t access a central part of who you are? To watch your children learn to speak your mother tongue and gradually forget it as the years pass, still able to visit that shared place but never to make a home in it? Dad, where is home for you?

A couple (friends, colleagues, or lovers, it’s hard to tell) settles on the grass on my other side, and my focus slides back and forth between the girl’s German conversation and their English one. In the liminal space between the two, it feels for a second like my own thoughts have no language.

Also during the pandemic, when we were all therapizing ourselves, I did an exercise that had me cut out dozens of slips of paper showing the names of different values (“loyalty,” “family,” “recognition,” and so on), and then sort the slips until I’d determined what my supposed “core values” were. At the top of the pile was “intimacy”: to deeply know and be deeply known by other people. I’m not sure exactly what I was supposed to do with this insight, but it seemed vaguely important at the time.

2020 was an extra hard year to be fundamentally driven by the desire for intimacy (yikes!), but it’s always impossible to know and to be known completely. There are always places inside us where other people can’t go. We confront the limits of intimacy even in the depths of love—like when we realize the person we’ve chosen to spend our life with is and always will be partially unknowable.

Right now, I’m in the shallows of love: surrounded by new people in a new place, reaching out, guessing at who they are, struggling to give them an accurate sense of who I am. Intimacy comes in unexpected moments, but for the most part, I feel unknown and unknowing. This is temporary and not necessarily a bad thing, but it means I’ve been thinking a lot about the power of first impressions. We make distorted patchwork people in our heads out of a few glimpses and second-hand stories. I’ve misjudged people and I’ve been misjudged, and I know it’ll happen again and again. And it’s no one’s fault, but it’s still hard to make peace with.

This is (I think?) what Sartre meant when he wrote that hell is other people: not that living in the world with other people is hellish, but that we’re damned to be endlessly perceived and judged. (Not judgement as in criticism, but judgement meaning just that our brains have to fill in a story about people with information that is always limited.) And it’s using those judgements that we assemble our own sense of self, I guess because that’s what it means to be a social animal.

Sometimes I feel anonymous on this huge campus, and sometimes I feel too seen. This morning, at the gym, there’s one of my students. The double-take, the moment of recognition, and “Oh!,” like she’s spotted a fish out of water. As I’m leaving the building, two more students, who shout my name gleefully across the quad. I sit down on a bench to eat and straight away a guy starts talking to me (oh to have the confidence of the average man…). I mishear his name as “Moriarty,” like the villain from Sherlock, and a minute later I make some excuse and escape to the shelter of the hillside. I am not in the mood for this.

It’s so weird to be perceived! Existing is so embarrassing! It’s weird to run into my students and to sense the artificial gap between them and me—we’re practically the same age—and the gap between the actual me and the me that I perform for them in the classroom. I hate that I’m invested in whether they think I’m cool. And interactions with new people, especially people I could picture myself becoming friends with, feel exciting but also laden with pressure. It’s strange to no longer have a social world made up of people who I could trust had formed a complex mental image of me just because we’d been around each other for so long, even if we weren’t especially close. And is there even an “actual me” in here?

The work of intimacy is done slowly, until at some point you look around and realize these people who were once strangers are now your family. I know my undergrad friendships weren’t perfect, and there were many times when I was lonely and insecure and frustrated. My dad, who’s patiently listened to me narrate my life since I first moved out, has been reminding me of this, trying to get me not to madly romanticize life in Hamilton and to approach life in Vancouver with an open heart. But even without the rose-coloured glasses, I know my relationships in undergrad were special. There are many places inside my friends where I can’t go—and things they do that make absolutely no sense to me—but we built a beautiful, imperfect kind of intimacy, and it changed me, probably more than I know. Those loves opened up new places in me.

“I’m not looking for anything serious,” I hear myself saying. I like you, but I can’t make a home in you. It’s too much, I can’t do it again, not now, not now.

In the end, hell is other people because we’re vulnerable to each other. Humans can’t be sovereign and self-contained; even when we try to turn inwards, we’re fundamentally exposed, we need each other, we can understand the world and ourselves only together with others. You can fight this vulnerability or you can embrace it. I learned how to embrace it, and when I think of my undergrad family, I think, home is other people.

The first time I fell in love, before she could say “I love you” back, she told me that I felt like home to her.

I know that with time, I’ll make a home here too, as long as I’m willing to do the work that intimacy requires. And I know that love travels with you, and so I’ll never be homeless. In a postcard of The Kiss she sent me from Vienna, Syd wrote that she thinks loving each other across distance and through different stages of our lives will build a new kind of intimacy between our friends. I hope she’s right. It’s a thought that makes the prospect of adulthood seem a lot brighter.

The maps app on my phone has started to recognize the apartment on West 16th as “home.” But it calls many places home, including Toronto and, hilariously, the last place the Bluetooth connected to Sanjana’s parents’ car—which was outside her old student house in Westdale at the beginning of the summer, when Syd, Ash, and I piled in to drive to the U-Haul place. All of these homes are true.

My heart is open to this newness, and at the same time, I’ve been taking comfort in making a home in myself. Even though I feel a little too perceived, I’m grateful for how much less anxious I am about what other people think than I used to be. I think one of the best things about growing up has been becoming more secure in what I value, how I act, and what I’ve chosen to do. I am just me, for better and for worse.

One of my favourite writers on Substack had a piece last week called “Annihilation of the selfie” (and I’m so here for the Alan Watts content!), in which she reflects on no longer regularly taking selfies and what that means for her relationship with herself.¹ Like Haley, I stopped taking selfies maybe three years ago, not because I consciously decided to but just because I stopped having the urge. Haley writes about selfie-taking for young adults as a kind of experimentation with identity and self-presentation in a phase of life when your sense of self is fragile and constantly in flux. She calls it “an externalized expression of an inward search.” I like that a lot, and I think it squares well with my experience. When I scroll through my camera roll, the fading out of the selfies tracks a growing sense of knowing who I am and being okay with it.

I am very much still searching, and I sure as hell don’t know what I’m doing, but I’m less affected by other people’s perceptions of me, or by how I think they perceive me. It’s disorienting (and, I think, thrilling) to move somewhere new and to be able to recreate myself freed from the impressions left by my past selves (Amarah wrote about something like this!), but at the same time, there’s a stability to who I am that I know I didn’t have when I was a teenager.

I feel at home in my body. I try my best to speak gently to myself, and to tend to the little fire in my chest that keeps me warm when I am not in the mood for the rest of the world. And I am sending love to everyone I’ve called home. <3

1. I follow her because Astrid showed me her writing! And Astrid’s also the reason I did the values sort during covid (we were therapizing each other, too). We haven’t seen each other in ages, but here’s proof that you carry love with you, in the traces other people leave behind in your life! I hope you’re doing well, wherever you are :)