I have lived, in adult life, in London, in Sydney, in New York, in Manila, and now in Bangkok. I have, in each of these cities, occupied apartments that, by every reasonable external measure, qualified as homes. The apartments had keys. The apartments had furniture. The apartments contained, in various permutations, the things that the cultural register agrees constitute the conditions for feeling at home. The dogs. The books. The kitchen with the kettle. The window with the particular view I had picked the apartment for.
None of them, in any honest sense, ever felt like home to me. The not-feeling has not been catastrophic. I have not, in any of these cities, been particularly unhappy. I have, in most of them, been broadly contented. But the specific feeling that other people seem to have when they describe being at home—the feeling of being structurally settled, of having arrived at the place one belongs, of being able to fully relax inside the walls of one’s own dwelling—has not, in any of the cities, fully arrived for me. The feeling has, more accurately, been a thing I have heard other people describe and have tried, at various points, to approximate.
For most of my twenties and early thirties, I assumed this was a problem with the places. I assumed that if I just kept moving, eventually I would arrive at the city, the apartment, the configuration that would, finally, produce the feeling. I treated the not-feeling-at-home as a logistical problem to be solved by better selection. The selection got better. The feeling did not arrive. By thirty-four or thirty-five, I had accumulated enough negative evidence to start suspecting that the problem was not, in fact, the places. The problem was, more accurately, my apparatus for receiving what places were trying to offer me. The apparatus had been built, somewhere in childhood, to do a particular kind of work that home-feeling, as other people experience it, was structurally incompatible with.
What the apparatus was originally built for
I have written, in other pieces, that I come from a household that was complicated in ways that the external view of it did not register. I do not want to overdramatize this. The household was not, in any obvious sense, dangerous. There was no violence. There was no neglect of the kind the cultural register would identify as worth noting. By every external measure, the household I grew up in was a successful suburban family, with two parents and two children and the standard furniture of an adequate British middle-class childhood.
What the external view missed, however, was a particular feature of the household’s interior weather that I have, in my adult life, come to recognize as the formative condition of how I now relate to enclosed spaces. The weather inside the house was, by some combination of factors I am still in the process of understanding, unpredictable in ways that required, from a child living inside it, a particular kind of ongoing alertness. The unpredictability was not, in any single instance, large. It was the unpredictability of small daily atmospheres. One could not, walking into the kitchen on a given afternoon, know in advance which version of the household one was going to find. The atmosphere shifted, in response to factors I could not, as a child, identify. The shifts were small. The shifts were also real. The shifts required, from me, a kind of constant background reading of the room that I now suspect was the foundational work of my early childhood.
By the time I was eight or nine, the reading was so thoroughly automatic that I did not, in any conscious sense, register that I was doing it. It was simply how I existed inside the house. I walked in. I scanned. I adjusted my behavior to the version of the household currently in operation. The scanning produced, by my late childhood, a particular kind of nervous-system configuration that has, for the entirety of my adult life, been the operating system I bring into every enclosed space I occupy.
The operating system is not, in itself, dramatic. It is, more accurately, the small ongoing background process by which my body reads any room I am in for the kind of weather information that, in childhood, was necessary for survival inside that particular house. The reading is not optional. The reading is what my body does when it finds itself in a room with walls and a ceiling and the structural features of a dwelling. The reading has been running, in some form, for thirty-eight years.
Why this prevents the home-feeling
The home-feeling, as other people describe it, requires a particular kind of nervous-system standing-down that the operating system I am describing does not, in any easy way, permit.
The standing-down involves the body being in a room and not, for the duration of being in the room, running any of the background reading I have just described. The body, in the home-feeling configuration, is structurally relaxed. The weather of the room is not being monitored. The room is, more accurately, simply the space the person is currently in, without any active interpretation being applied to it.
My body, by long training, cannot easily produce this configuration. When I am in an apartment, even an apartment I have lived in for years, even an apartment in which the actual weather has been reliably benign for the entire duration of my occupancy, the background reading is still running. The reading is calibrated to a household that no longer exists, in conditions that no longer apply, but the calibration is, in some real way, what my body knows how to do inside walls. It does not, in any easy way, switch off when the walls in question are, by every external measure, safe.
The result is that I have, in five different cities, occupied apartments that should, by any reasonable accounting, have produced the home-feeling, and have, in each of them, continued to operate at a slightly elevated baseline of background alertness that the home-feeling structurally precludes. The apartments did not fail to produce the feeling because there was something wrong with them. The apartments failed to produce the feeling because the apparatus that would have received the feeling has been configured, since I was small, to do a different kind of work that the feeling is incompatible with.
The constant moving, and what I now think it was for
I want to acknowledge something about my history with cities that I have, until recently, not been fully honest with myself about.
I have always told myself, and told other people, that I move because I enjoy moving. That I am drawn to new places. That I get itchy after a few years in one city and need to find a new one. The framing is partially true. I do enjoy new cities. I am drawn to them. The itchiness is real.
What the framing has, however, also been doing, is masking a slightly less flattering reading of the same pattern. The slightly less flattering reading is that the moving has been, in some real way, a strategy for managing the fact that no apartment, in any city, has ever fully felt like home. The moving has allowed me to frame the not-feeling-at-home as a feature of the current city rather than as a feature of my own apparatus. The next city, in this framing, is the one that will finally produce the feeling. The current city’s failure to produce the feeling is, accordingly, the current city’s fault rather than mine.
I want to be clear that the moving has not been, in any obvious sense, a problem. The cities I have lived in have, each of them, given me a great deal. London gave me my early adulthood. Sydney gave me my education. New York gave me the relationship that I have written about elsewhere and the early years of my professional life. Manila gave me a particular kind of expansion in my sense of what kinds of lives were possible. Bangkok, which I have been in for years now, has given me the writing, the dogs, and the closest thing to settled adult life I have managed to construct. The moving has been productive. The moving has not been a flight in any obvious sense.
What the moving has been, on closer examination, is a particular strategy for keeping the question of why I do not feel at home anywhere in the category of solvable rather than in the category of structural. As long as there was a next city, the question could remain open. The moment I stopped moving, the question would have to be answered honestly. The answering would require acknowledging that the not-feeling-at-home was not a problem with the cities. It was a problem with me, in the specific sense of being a problem with the apparatus I had been issued at six.
What I stopped trying to fix, in my mid-thirties
Somewhere in my mid-thirties, in Bangkok, I stopped trying to fix this. I want to describe what I mean by that, because it sounds, in summary, more dramatic than it actually was.
I did not, in any visible sense, change my life. I still have an apartment. I still have the dogs. I still, by every external measure, occupy the conditions for the home-feeling. What I stopped doing was treating the absence of the feeling as a problem that the next adjustment was going to solve. I stopped, in particular, treating the next trip, the next city, the next apartment as the answer. I started, instead, to treat the absence of the home-feeling as a structural fact about my apparatus rather than as a deficiency in the conditions I was currently inhabiting.
The shift was, in its way, a relief. The shift removed, from my daily life, the small ongoing project of trying to engineer the home-feeling that, on the available evidence, was not going to arrive regardless of how the conditions were engineered. The shift allowed me, in some real way, to live in the apartments I had been occupying without the additional layer of disappointment that they were not, despite my efforts, producing the feeling I had been expecting them to produce.
What I have, instead of the home-feeling, is a particular kind of contentment that does not require the home-feeling to function. The contentment is calibrated to the actual conditions of my life. The dogs. The morning coffee at the same kitchen counter. The Sunday calls with my father. The small ongoing texture of a Bangkok existence that I have, in the years here, gradually built. The contentment is, in some real way, a different kind of feeling than the home-feeling would have been. The contentment is what is available to me. The home-feeling, on the available evidence, may not be.
The honest acknowledgment
I want to acknowledge, plainly, that I do not know whether the home-feeling is, in any final sense, recoverable for me. The apparatus was built in childhood. The conditions for its rebuilding may not, by now, be available. I may, in some real way, be a person who will live in apartments, occasionally have trips planned, enjoy the cities he is in, and never quite have the experience that other people seem to have of being structurally at home inside a dwelling. This is not, I want to say, a tragedy. It is, more accurately, the structural inheritance of a particular kind of childhood, and the work of being an adult with this inheritance is, in some real way, the work of constructing a life that does not require the home-feeling in order to be a good life.
The constructing is the work I have, in some small way, been doing in Bangkok for the last few years. The construction is incomplete. The construction is, also, the most honest version of the project that is, in fact, available to me. The body that reads a house for weather does not, in most cases, fully stand down even when the weather is finally fine. The standing-down may be partial. The partial standing-down is what I have. The partial standing-down is, on the available evidence, enough to build a life on, even if the life that gets built is, in some real way, not the same life that other people, with different apparatuses, are able to build inside their own walls.
I have a trip planned for next month. The trip is to Vietnam, for a long weekend. The trip is not, this time, an attempt to find a place that will, finally, produce the home-feeling. The trip is just a trip. The going and the coming back are, in some real way, the rhythm I have settled into. The coming back, to the apartment in Bangkok, will be to the closest thing to home I have. The closest thing is not the thing. The closest thing is what is available. The being able to recognize the difference, without continuing to mistake one for the other, is what most of my last few years of internal work has been about. The internal work is, slowly, producing results. The results are not the home-feeling. The results are, more modestly, the capacity to live well in its absence. That is, on examination, what I have. It is, increasingly, enough.
