Home is where the feelings are

It occured to me last night as our daughter, who is calm and quiet outside of our house wailed and screamed and yelled and kicked that she does it at home because she feels safe here.

An email from a friend who is keeping a happy face to cover a breaking heart admits to bawling her eyes out at home for days at a time.

Home is the only place I yell. I wouldn't dare to yell on the street. And I feel guilty that it is my nearest and dearest who see the majority of my negativity and intense emotions.

I find myself almost running for cover at times, trying to hold it together until I get home, until I can let go, collapse the social face and just be as I need to be.

And I got a sense of all of us, all around the world, discharging our depth and breadth of human emotions within our homes - making love, yelling, crying, celebrating small and big triumphs, mourning, freaking out, worrying. All the human stuff that human society has no stomach for and that the world of work and socialising has no time for. All the sides of us that go on unseen, that we have to watch in the movies, or have friends confide in us their own experiences, to know that we are not alone. If you based your knowledge of what it means to be human on what you see with your own eyes away from TV, then sex would not exists. Nor would hysterical crying. Orgasms and anxiety attacks also would not exist. Life is bland stream of bored, polite, fake smiling faces when seen in public. Home is where the richness is, home is where the heart is free to feel.

And it occured to me that we are sold an idea of home, as a place that looks good, or that provides a place to eat and sleep. But far more, home provides us with a safe space to be fully human, to feel, to learn to express these feelings. That the walls of our homes are charged with this human emotion, layer upon layer of our unseeable selves lies invisibly on top of the wallpaper or paint. This repository of ourselves within a space is what makes us so deeply attached to our spaces, which makes them so much more than mere bricks and mortar, or canny investments.