90. How to make a house a home.

I brought one suitcase, four books and a laptop. But I didn't come alone.

I’ve never had a place that felt like home so I had a head start in that race. The only two places that remained the same as time went on were my grandparent’s houses. They’d smell the same, the furniture never moved around, the carpet felt comforting and there was always a familiar feeling as you walked in. Apart from visiting my grandparents, I never had anywhere else that felt like this.

As a child we moved from Leicester to Wales and from Wales to Spain. In Spain we lived in six different houses and when my parents divorced my brother and I got four more places to live in. The feeling of packing up your life into boxes and then moving them somewhere new was second nature. We’d done it so many times we always knew it was a matter of time before it would happen again.

The constant moving wasn’t traumatic for me. I enjoyed leaving one house behind and moving into somewhere new full of potential. I’d be given a new bedroom, a blank slate to work with and decorate—something I took very seriously as a child and teenager. I also enjoyed feeling like the new house and neighborhood was foreign the first week and it slowly becoming a part of me, or me becoming a part of it.

I never had any issues with not having one specific house feel like my home because I was brought up used to the idea of moving. I did, however, have an internal conflict regarding belonging to a country and a culture. I was born in Britain, all of my family is British, and my first language was English. After breaking that norm and going to a Welsh school while being taught in Welsh, another barrier was broken when we moved to Spain. I was seven years old and thrown into the deep end—this part was more traumatic, maybe that’s the origin of the internal conflict.

I’ve lived in Spain since I was seven and I was brought up in a Spanish environment all my life apart from when I was at home. Being with my parents meant being English and following English customs. But as soon as I’d step outdoors, I’d be Spanish and adjust all of my beliefs and core to fit in with my surroundings. A professional shapeshifter.

Now, I’m one step away from having Spanish citizenship which I thought would solve my identity crisis but in reality I now know that it wont. I’ll always be a mix of both and I don’t see that as much of a problem anymore. Another big lesson I’ve learnt with time is that no specific place is home because a home doesn’t depend on the bricks that form the house.

Home is made up by the people and how you feel there.

Nowadays my home is wherever C is. As long as we’re together we’re at home and whenever we’re apart, I know where my home is. The feeling of being at home doesn’t depend on a specific address, it depends on where I am with C. Him and I are each other’s nuclear family now and we’re building our life together, no matter where we do it, we’ll be at home. This feeling wasn’t easy to learn because we were taught to set down roots in one place and make it our home forever. We unconsciously chose something different, which meant that we had to break our old mental patterns around the idea of where and what a home was. But once we understood that coming home means being together in any part of the world, a new door opened.

We moved to France two weeks ago with very few belongings and no idea of what we were getting ourselves into but what we ended up finding has surpassed all of our wildest dreams. Two weeks ago, a house in the north of Spain was our home and what we knew. Now, our home is in the French countryside. We haven’t decorated or changed the house to make it feel more like a home, we’ve simply lived here and fed the place with our energy and love, and we’ve received the same in return in every single aspect possible.

A place can become a home very quickly if you don’t need to buy new furniture, ornaments, cutlery wallpaper and have hundreds of boxes to unpack and find a home for. A house can become a home with four books, a suitcase and a lot of love.