As of today, we have been living in the ‘new house’ for two years. So it’s not exactly new. But after living somewhere for fifteen years, two years feels like nothing. In fifteen years, I became a person, my own person. Then I blinked and two years went by. It’s not even comparable.

There were so, so many good memories in the ‘old’ house: the late night games me and my brother would play where we made nests out of our bedding, bringing Lucky home at eight weeks old, listening to the same Annie Lennox CD every year as we decorated the Christmas tree, evenings watching TV as a family, my Dad telling us made up Harry Potter stories until we fell asleep, waking up to Snubby curled up on the pillow next to me even if it meant a mouthful of fur, big dinners with family and friends, bringing Lucy home, things as simple as coming home to the living room windows open and Wimbledon on the television. There are more good memories than I can count.

There were also bad memories, like my Mum crying after her Dad died, coming home after being bullied at school, watching my brother come home after being bullied at school, the early meltdowns, Lucky getting sick, having my heart broken for the first time, being told my cat was terminally ill, taking her to the vet that last time and coming home without her… finding out that my Dad had died. They aren’t memories I want to spend time with but they are moments that made me who I am and so I need them safe. And those walls kept them safe for years. But memories aren’t like possessions. You can’t pack them into a box when you leave a place. So what if you reach your new house and they haven’t travelled with you? At least not with the same clarity, in the same condition, that they were in where you previously lived? What if small details have been left behind?

“So what is it that makes us mourn the loss of a structure? It’s not the great architecture, or the way the light pours in through the windows in the morning. It’s the loss of the vessel that held our memories. It’s almost as if leaving a home rich in such a lived-in history causes our memories to spill out everywhere, and we feel like we’ve spun out of orbit, scrambling to collect them… But we have to remember that we have lost the vessel, not the memories. We just have to build a new place to hold them.” – Kelli Kehler on Design Sponge (x)

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been walking around, looking at the house and trying to figure out how I feel about it, how I feel about the fact that it’s been two years since we left the place that I’d always considered home. I’d never thought far enough ahead to consider anywhere else home. This is where I live now – I know that – but when I think of home, it’s the old house. But that’s not home anymore either because it’s got other people in it who will have changed things – who will be filling it with their own memories – so I’m not sure where ‘home’ is. In a way, I feel kind of homeless. It doesn’t help that even though we’ve been here two years, we haven’t had much time to do anything to make it ours. Not really.

It’s a grieving process. And it’s one that hasn’t been properly dealt with because there’s been so much going on: medication changes, going back to university, challenges with my mental health. To say it’s been hard is a pretty huge understatement. It’s been one of the hardest things to happen in my life.

But I guess there’s a reason we call it a grieving process. Because it is a process. Our feelings change day to day. We move forward, we move back. Our emotions heighten, they settle, and then they heighten again. It’s ever changing. So rather than sum up the last two years, I’m trying just to think about now and when I think about now, this is what comes to mind: most days, it’s okay or it’s at least not something I think about. But there are still days where I hate it, where it feels like I’m walking around wearing someone else’s skin.

I’ve read various articles about moving out of your childhood home and adjusting to a new house and something that came up a lot was finding things you like about your new surroundings and where you find things you don’t like, try to figure out why and what you can do about it.

So here are some examples…

What do I love about it?

• The living room feels like a safe bubble, where I can shut out the world when I need to. I especially like it since we hung fairy lights around the room. Plus it’s where the cats spend most of their time.
• I like the white curtains in my room and the living room. I’d only ever had dark coloured curtains so I thought I’d hate them when we moved in but I actually really like them. As a person who’s sensitive to light, it’s really nice to be able to block out the bright light but still have natural light in the room.
• I love the fireplace. It’s beautiful and fires in the winter is something that me and my Mum look forward to all year.
• I love the big, glass double doors that lead out into the garden, which has a deck, a eucalyptus tree, and yellow roses. It’s the perfect garden.

What don’t I love and how can I change those things?

• I don’t love my room. It’s not MY room; it’s just a room I sleep in. I don’t hate it – I like the colour and the curtains and the bed – but I don’t love it. I want to go through my clothes and get rid of things that don’t feel like me, put some pictures up, and generally just make the space ‘feel’ right. But, to a degree, I think that’s something I’ll only know when I feel it.
• I want a space to make music – even if it’s tiny – where I can put my laptop, microphone, MIDI keyboard, and so on. I just want my own little space, not something I have to reassemble every time I want to record something.
• Both me and Mum really dislike the bathroom. We don’t dwell on it but not a week goes by that one of us doesn’t curse one element of it or another. The floorboards are super squeaky, the flooring is ugly, it’s cramped, and it’s just impractically planned out. It’s the only room we’ve always wanted to completely re-do. We’d started the planning process but obviously that’s on hold while we’re in lockdown.
• The house is still a bit bare, a bit impersonal. It still doesn’t quite feel like ours. I couldn’t figure out why until recently, when I looked around and realised that we still haven’t put up more than a couple of pictures. So me and Mum have pledged to put more personal touches around the house, as well as put up more pictures and photos. Given the lockdown, this is one of the few ‘decorating’ things we can do without leaving the house.

Me and Mum have been talking about this, about this feeling, for quite a while. But with my Masters, I haven’t had the time or the energy to do much about it. And Mum’s been working and helping me manage everything. But my second semester is ending and we’re stuck in lockdown so we’re planning to carve out some time to get more comfortable here – or get me more comfortable, at least, as the one more sensitive to this issue. We won’t be going out to get paint or new tiles or anything like that given the current situation but since we’re both stuck in the house with some extra free time, we thought we’d start with the things we can do while in lockdown, like putting up pictures. We also have a scale drawing of my room and cut outs of my furniture and have been moving them around to try and create a set up that is both practical and feels right to me, enough at least to try out.

So we’ll see how it goes. Nothing’s going to change overnight, but then what does? One step at a time, hopefully this house will feel more like home.

Tips for moving out of your childhood home. (x)