Every once in a while—maybe once a year, maybe more, maybe less—I change journals. Sometimes the pages run out, other times because I need a symbolic clean slate. I’ll rush the last few entries in December just to make new space for January.
When I was younger, I used to burn my old journals. I believed that once something had passed, it should stay there. Done, gone, reduced to ash. Maybe also because I was terrified someone might read them. I’d rather torch a piece of myself than have it misinterpreted—or worse, have someone know this side of me and want to put themselves into my narrative.
I stopped burning them in college. That was the first time I had a room I could actually call mine, even if it was temporary. It had a door that locked. A bed I chose. A shelf filled with books that felt like old friends and new selves. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to start keeping records instead of erasing them.
In that quiet, I started meeting myself again. Slowly. Awkwardly. Like reintroducing yourself to someone you ghosted. I learned to hold space for my own voice, even when it didn’t sound polished or wise. Even when it contradicted itself on the next page. I started noticing patterns in my thoughts, in my habits, in the way I wanted to show up in the world.
And then something unexpected happened: I met people—friends, real ones–who didn’t want to rewrite me, but just wanted to read along. People who made me feel like I didn’t need to burn the parts of myself that felt too complicated. With them, I could be messy and still be held. They helped me believe in the idea that maybe the best version of myself wasn’t someone polished, distant ideal—but someone already here, just waiting to be seen without flinching.
And that’s when I started seeing the pattern.
On almost every journal, or tucked inside some early page, I’d always scribble: Go big or go home.
It felt like a mantra. A spell. A borrowed battle cry I whispered to myself while pulling all-nighters and overcommitting to everything. Go big or go home. As if there was a place I could return to that would catch me if I fell.
But recently, the words started to feel strange. Because… what home? What exactly, was I going back to?
I’m particular about my things. Not in the obsessive, has-to-be-spotless kind of way. My room is rarely spotless, far from pristine. In fact, it’s kind of a beautiful mess most of the time. But it’s my mess. And every little mess has its place. And I know it intimately.
I know which pile of clothes is clean-ish. I know the book I’m currently reading is probably spread across three different surfaces, but I also know exactly where each copy is: one on the floor near the shelf, one on my bedside table with a receipt inside, one dangerously close to the edge of my working table. I know where I left my skincare last night, even if it migrates every evening; sometimes on the windowsill, sometimes next to my bed, once inside my tote bag for no reason at all.
I like it this way. These little arrangements. They look chaotic to anyone else, but to me, they’re a system. They’re a soft architecture of how I move through my days. The room holds the imprint of my tempo, and that makes me feel grounded. I can be both in control and completely at ease.
I’ve been living alone—or close enough to it—since college. And that’s when I started noticing how much of myself I tuck into these spaces. The smell of the room. The angle of the lighting. The particular silence that only settles when the space is yours and no one else’s. The ultimate unfiltered comfort. The ability to move through a space and trust that it remembers you.
When I’ve lived with other people—even the ones I love—I feel it when the balance shifts. Someone borrows a mug and doesn’t put it back where they found it, and now it just sits there, out of place, almost mocking you, as if it knows it’s no longer yours in the way it used to be.
Someone leaves the toilet lid open again even though I’ve asked gently, over and over again—not in a way that’s angry, not anymore, but more like a pleading, asking in that quiet tone people use when they want to be respected without having to make it a big deal, when they hope love means noticing small things like that.
My books get moved, sometimes only a little, like a careless nudge, and sometimes they’re placed in a completely different spot entirely, as if their original home wasn’t a home at all, and it always throws me off, like I have to reintroduce myself to the room.
My pillow was used, the one I chose to sleep on every night, and when I brought it up they said it was just like any other pillow, and I didn’t know how to explain that it’s not. It’s not just a pillow. It’s the thing that holds my dreams, the thing that smells like my skin and feels like safety, and after that, even the silence in the room didn’t sound the same.
And maybe these sound like small things, like nothing, but they never feel like nothing. They pile. They collect like dust in corners you thought were clean. Because I live in the quiet. I live in the unspoken agreements I have with my own space, the systems I built to keep myself steady. And when those systems get moved or borrowed or overlooked, even just a little, I feel like I have to renegotiate my place in the world.
That’s when I started to understand that maybe a house is just a structure. Four walls. A door. A bathroom someone else might forget to close. And maybe home is something else entirely. Something I keep trying to name.
It was also when I was in college that I began to search for it—whatever it was. I didn’t call it home yet. I didn’t have the language for that. I just knew there was something I kept looking for in places, in people, in moments that felt warmer than the rest. I found pieces of it scattered like breadcrumbs, and each one made me think I was getting closer. Something that leaned forward and asked quietly, could this be it?
I thought I found a piece of it in the middle of a crowded campus sports hall, so thick I could barely hear myself think, when a hand reached out and held mine without asking, not forcefully but firmly, like they knew I needed to be steadied and didn’t need me to explain why.
Another time, it was late at night in a corner stall I kept going back to, over bowls of warm food and hours of conversation about literature and theory and everything in between. One talked about Nietzsche like it mattered to them, like the idea of meaninglessness could be wrestled into something beautiful if we just kept talking. I listened and nodded and thought, maybe being known can start here, in this strange meeting between thought and affection.
There were also the coffeeshops that became something I started to expect. Like a comma in my week, a quiet flow I could trust. The kind of routine that never came with a promise, where there was no agreement to talk about anything in particular—but somehow, I always did. About poems I hadn’t read yet, films I didn’t know I was supposed to love, lyrics that made me feel something I hadn’t realized I was missing. They didn’t offer answers, and they didn’t ask for mine either. They just spoke like the world was full of things worth noticing, and I wanted to notice them too.
One dinner blurred into memory—not because it didn’t matter, but because the details faded next to what it became. I don’t remember the food but I won’t forget how I stayed longer than I meant to. The conversation had a kind of gravity to it, the kind that makes you forget to check your phone, forget the time, forget the idea that this was supposed to be ordinary. I remember how easy it was to talk, how natural it felt to say too much without feeling like it was too much at all. Without planning to, the 36 questions to fall in love were answered between bites and laughter that came too freely, the kind that surprises you by how quickly it becomes a kind of safety.
It kept happening: on other days, in other places, in cafés tucked between bookstores, on walks that didn’t need a destination, in emails about everything and nothing, in corners of the world that suddenly felt less sharp when they were there.
And maybe that was when I started to believe that the thing I had been looking for—this it—was not a fixed point, not a destination, but a feeling. That maybe it was made up of these small, unannounced offerings. That it lived in gestures people made without knowing how much they were giving. In the questions asked gently. In the space made quietly. In the presence that didn’t ask me to shrink or explain.
That maybe home wasn’t a place at all. Maybe home was people.
Not always, and not forever, but in the way they held space. In the way they let me leave parts of myself behind. In the way they unknowingly helped me start to build something soft and solid out of the mess I had been carrying.
I think about that phrase often now, go big or go home. It shows up like muscle memory whenever I open a new journal, like my hand already knows what to write before I’ve decided what it means. I used to love how sure it sounded. How clear. As if those were the only two options: leap, or retreat.
But now the word home catches in my throat a little.
I don’t know where it begins or ends anymore. Some days it feels like my room. The specific pile of clothes I haven’t folded in a week. The low hum of my dehumidifier. The way my books lean toward each other. The chipped edge of my mirror. Other days it feels like a conversation I stayed too long in. A playlist I keep replaying even when I’ve memorized all the lyrics of the songs. A long walk with no destination. A look across a table that doesn’t need translating.
And some days, it’s nowhere. Sometimes, I think maybe I made it all up. That I’ve never actually known what home is, only what it isn’t.
I still listen to the songs, though, the ones that promise home is wherever I’m with you, or I want to go home, or you’re my home, and I believe them until the song ends. I think of all the stories we’re fed about it—final scenes in films where someone returns and the door is still open, where someone comes back and the lights are still on. I used to love those endings. I used to crave that kind of symmetry.
Now I wonder if that version of home ever really existed, or if it only ever belonged to people who got to leave without wondering what they were leaving behind.
Maybe home doesn’t wait.
Maybe it’s not something you go back to.
Maybe it’s not even something you find.
Maybe it’s something you make, quietly, imperfectly, through the way you love and live. Through the spaces you try to protect. Through the people you stay soft for. Through the rituals you return to when nothing else makes sense. Maybe it’s not a fixed thing at all. It shifts. It flickers. It leaves and comes back in another form.
I still don’t know what home is, not in the way I used to want to. But I know what it isn’t. I know when something almost feels like it, and I know what it feels like to lose it. Still, I’ll write go big or go home on my next journal. I probably always will.
But this time, home isn’t something I’m trying to return to just because I didn’t go big enough. This time, home is something I will learn how to carry. Something I will keep building, in the quiet, in the mess, in the soft weight of everything I don’t know yet.
Something I will choose. Something I will earn. Something I will keep searching for, even if I never quite arrive.
✦ Traces of Inspiration ✦
Shrinking (Apple TV+) - I watched this show a couple of months ago, thinking I’d just laugh along another quirky therapist dramedy—but it surprised me with how deeply it understood grief, proximity, and the mess of trying to heal with other people in the room. There’s something about the way these charecters orbit each other: imperfect, overlapping, often annoying—that reminded me of how many ways we try (and fail) to create home through the people around us.
They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us by Hanif Abdurraqib - There’s a specific kind of reverence Hanif holds for music, memory, and movement that always makes me want to look at my life more slowly. The essays in this book, and even more so the thoughts he shares online, feel like a reminder that we don’t just survive through structure—we survive by creating space for our own voice to echo back at us. His writing made me question how many of my own routines are just ways of searching for a feeling I still don’t know how to name.
Lonely Castle in the Mirror by Mizuki Tsujimura - A quiet, strange fantasy about children who step into a hidden world because their own homes aren’t safe or soft enough to hold them. I read this one slowly, almost protectively, because it reminded me how powerful the need for safety is—even when the world offers none. This book gave me language for what it means to build a temporary regufe, and how sometimes, that’s all we have.
Some conversations in which I also found pieces of home - You know who you are. The ones who sent me songs, books, articles, just because they reminded them of me. The ones who read my writing without trying to underline themselves in it. The ones who wrote for me—not polished, not performative, just honest in the way that matters most. I don’t know whether they knew or not, but writing has always been how I come to understand things more clearly. When I don’t know where home is, I remember I can always come back to this.