Starving to belong

I feel like I come back to this thought so often. Too often. But the thought of not having a place to call home. A place that I know without a shadow of a doubt that I can call home and that I belong 100% of the time without worry. I thought I had that for a while, but I was wrong. It's still really difficult not to be resentful or bitter about everything that happened in March.

I was talking with my counselor last weekend when I went to visit the ranch. We got talking about this subject and I ended up mentioning that when I'm far away from the closest thing I call "home"...I think about my biological family more and about what home was like there and in a very strange way, I miss it. He connected it to the fact that even though it sucked and was really awful, that it was always the place that I went. Going there over and over again and being able to call it "home" has trained my brain to still call it home because nothing has been able to fully replace it yet. I walked through that door a thousand + times, all my stuff was there, etc. It was predictable, it was home.

Now I don't have that. He thinks I need more practice, I need more time to re-establish home because without it, my chances of going back are greater. He suggested me bring it up to mom and dad (Joe and Laura) to see what they thought of that when I come back in August. My counselor thinks its really important, and so do I. But I'm absolutely terrified to go down that road again. Granted, this will be a much different approach but I don't want to be rejected. I'm afraid to bring it up and wait to see what they say. And I think that's part of the reason why the separation was so difficult for me. I had just started to re-establish "home" and then it was ripped from me. I actually had a house key for once! That in and of itself was a really big deal for me. Like, huge. A house key that represents a safe place where I am loved and I belong, always. No matter what. It was nice to have a house key on my key ring and not just my lonely car key which has served as home to me too many times before. That's usually the only place I have to go.

As I've been thinking about all of this and processing the conversation with my counselor, trying to figure out what to do with it, I realized...I haven't lived in one place for more than 9 months since I was 7 years old.

Sick.

Even though I was in and out during middle school and high school, there was still home. The house that I could go to where all of my things were, where the people were familiar (yet awful) and I knew what was coming to me if I left my shoes in the wrong place. In a twisted way, the familiarity of it all provided some comfort. It was the sense of knowing that was comforting. Although my mother (Sonia) was pretty unpredictable, there was still something familiar about her irregularity. At any rate, still wrestling with this and I'm not sure if I will bring it up to mom and dad because I am quite fearful. I guess I'll figure it out eventually, hopefully sooner rather than later.