On the concept of ‘home’ – Part 2

Yesterday I wrote about  my struggle with the concept of ‘home’ in a sense of the German word ‘Heimat’ (maybe you want to read the first part of this article first: Part 1). Heimat is the place where you belong. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a real place, but it is usually strongly connected to the place where you grew up. Nowadays a lot of people can’t connect with their home towns or even home countries in this way anymore, mostly because they always have the opportunity to leave and to see new places, which might be a lot better than their home towns/countries. I myself didn’t give my home town any chance and in fact I wouldn’t recommend visiting it. The only good thing about it is the art museum. Apart from that and maybe the big Karl-Marx-monument, which is entertaining for nostalgic reasons, there is nothing to see, really! My article yesterday finished off with explaining that Düsseldorf, where I had lived 4 years had become my home, just when I was about to leave for a semester abroad in England. This is where I will continue:

As was to be expected In England everything went wrong for a term. After a horrible start in a host family with a single Mum of 3 (who was a hopeless drunk) in a room that basically had a window which wouldn’t shut, I ended up in student accommodation. It was a luxury I only got through my rather American flatmate, who threatened to sue the university if they would force us to stay in this host family (Brian was from New York). The next three months basically didn’t really turn out to be any better: I had almost no friends, I was lonely, there wasn’t an awful lot of tango (even though I met some nice people there) and on top of that I had incredible amounts of coursework that I wasn’t used to, in a language that gave me a lot of trouble. The most disturbing thing were the English drinking habits though. English people are not stuck up, they always believe that everything will work out fine, probably because they drown their worries in booze. Maybe I was in a very special situation because I was living with freshers who just reached the drinking age, but I honestly haven’t met a lot of English people who don’t get drunk regularly. In fact so far those mysterious non-drinkers were Cambridge students or people who already had a serious alcohol problem in the past. I really wasn’t used to this and I really really found it quite disturbing for a while. On top of all that my relationship (that wasn’t really a relationship) went to shambles when I was in England and yah, it really all went wrong! If it wouldn’t have been for my flatmate Nadia and a few kind souls I met in tango, I would have left after 3 weeks max!

When I came back to England after Christmas break, I kinda fixed my “relationship”, I got a flashy new course called Phenomenology (and a few others that I didn’t like that much) and I exercised daily to keep my spirits up. I was really determined to make the best of it. My so-called relationship again went to shambles and I gave up on it. To be honest I was quite sick of the bad dynamics between us and was even slightly relieved about not having to bother with his attitude anymore. I actually started to have a rather good time in England, I really enjoyed my Phenomenology course and I joined in for the general party spirit of the freshers, probably because I fell in love with an English guy (well, in fact Irish, but born in England)! It really changed a lot and also my perspective on the English judgement of things.

The interesting thing about the English attitude is that it really always works out somehow! I can’t count how often my ex-boyfriend was broke and he always somehow managed to survive, get some money from some psychology experiment and so on. When he didn’t have a place to stay, one would magically come up and he even passed his first year at uni after first failing 4 courses (of – he didn’t show up and got drunk like any other first year student might happen to do, if he just isn’t really interested in his degree. If you know everything will work out fine anyway, you won’t give a shit about anything at all. At least it seems like it! Anyway: for a time I actually found it quite refreshing to be confronted with this kind of attitude. Apparently with the living conditions and work ethics one has to face in England (judged by German standards of course) you just have to adopt this English attitude or else England will drive you nuts.

After 6 months of English insanity – one way or another – what really didn’t work for me was coming back to Germany to finish my degree. On the one hand I really didn’t want to go back, because of my ex-boyfriend, on the other hand of course I wanted to go home. I had realized that Düsseldorf was home just before I left for England. I had realized that I loved the place and that my roots where deep there. When I actually came back though everything seemed different. I didn’t really care about my degree anymore, because I found something much more fascinating in England – namely Artificial Intelligence – and tango turned out to become more complicated when you’re becoming a decent dancer. Düsseldorf doesn’t have that many good dancers and you end up going somewhere else to dance the good tangos. I was generally way too stressed out to do that. It wasn’t Düsseldorf that was different. I was different. It took me another 5 months to adjust to that, find people to give me a ride to tango in different places. I even found more good friends in tango and Düsseldorf became home again. And guess what: then I had to leave! Again! I had to leave to start my new degree in England!

I should have known it: It of course took longer than half a year to adjust to England for the second time, mainly because I went back to Germany for a month in every break. My relationship with my Irishman didn’t survive my struggle with the concept of home. Sometimes I even believe I never should have come to England in the first place! It ended up being pretty bad: I lost my home again, lost my man and was diagnosed with coeliac disease. Could there be a worse year? Probably there can be, but I better don’t think about it

Why am I telling you about all this? Even though it somehow turns out like that anyway, this isn’t supposed to be a blog about my life story after all, right? It is a blog about personal development: It exists to help other people (and myself) to grow. The question that you really want to ask is: What does this all mean to me?

Home in the sense of “Heimat” is not where your house or flat is, it is not where your kids go to school, where you do your grocery shopping or where your work place is. You can live in a place for 17 years and still not feel at home at all. It might feel like a random place to you, it might even feel like a place where you don’t even want to be. Does this feel familiar to you? If yes, then it is time to change something about it!

Do you want to go home? I would love to live in Düsseldorf again. I’d probably buy a car and then it would be the perfect place to live in. I’d know exactly where I would want to live. I sometimes even dream about being back in Düsseldorf and living there. Why don’t I go home then?

Well, it’s not all that easy, you know? In Düsseldorf I have family (my Dad lives in the close lawnmower-rich town Kaarst, which is 30 min from Düsseldorf by slow train), I have friends, roots, tango, memories, but to be honest I wouldn’t know what to do there! I would probably be able to get a random job, which I wouldn’t enjoy. I couldn’t go after my academic aspirations, because the uni in Düsseldorf is mainly a medical school with some random other schools that internationally don’t make a difference at all. I couldn’t do AI there, because computing generally is not very good there. I thought about the random job option and it certainly is a realistic option. The problem is though, that I would regret not trying to fulfil my potential. I generally wouldn’t do anything that I’d regret. That’s in fact why I never regret things even when everything goes wrong: I always have very good reasons for doing what I do. Regretting is for people without those reasons. In short: It wouldn’t make me happy to go home! Does this sound familiar to you?

In the past 2 years I realized that being at home is one big building block of happiness – “home’ in all the different facets of the concept’s meaning. Sometimes you come to a place and it feels like home right away. Berlin is like that for me. I could certainly just go there and live there and I would love it. Brighton was never like that for me. When I was 12 I was in Brighton for the first time. It was a stormy autumn day, the sea was violent and there was thunder while we were laying messages with wet stones on the beach. Then all hell broke loose and the storm began. I said to a friend “This is great, one day I wanna live here!” Brighton is rarely that impressive and a storm is hardly a sign that you can be happy in a place. Brighton can be really beautiful, but it’s small and not as metropolitan as Düsseldorf. You can’t go to 50 other cities in the area, you can only go to London which is in fact a pain.

For me however, it is time to make Brighton a home. Not necessarily to replace Düsseldorf, but to make it nearly as important for me. I want to have the feeling that I need to go there at least once every half a year to see my friends, well to feel at home again! I want to grow some roots in Brighton or else I will always want to go home to Düsseldorf and feel unhappy in Brighton. I have to stay in Brighton for at least another 2 years, maybe even 3. I don’t want to feel unhappy for that long! There’s a dazzling question though: How do you grow roots?

Here is what my experience in Düsseldorf taught me about the conditions of growing roots:

1. decent living conditions so that you actually like going home.
2. something that gives you purpose, and which you can’t do in a random place.
3. being connected to people who are likely to stay in the area.

In Düsseldorf living conditions are quite good, because rent is cheap compared to English prices. If you take your time to look for a decent place you can actually find a nice cheap place even if you think in German prices. What gave me purpose in Düsseldorf were my studies. You can only study Media and Cultural studies in very few places in Germany and our program was compared to the other programs quite special. It served as a good purpose for quite a while, until everything else went wrong (apart from my studies). Still, those two things are pretty much random – any random place and any random thing: I could have decided to do something else which you can only do somewhere else.

What made me really connect with people who are likely to stay in Düsseldorf was tango. Tango is something that mostly older people do and if you find young people there you become fast friends. Even those in tango who are good 20 years older than me still have a common interest in tango, there’s always something to talk about! You might not become real friends over just one common interest, but it helps a lot to get connected. And suddenly you are in the middle of a subculture full of complex rituals and social rules, you group up with other people, there’s gossip and so on. You go dancing in another town with people you’ve only danced with once, because nothing can happen to you: everyone would know – in the tango scene even the wine glasses and cars seem to gossip. What tango is for me could be anything else: Toastmasters club, Hackerspace, pottery circle, tai chi classes.

In Brighton I’ve almost fulfilled the conditions of growing roots as well:

1. My new house will provide me with new living conditions much better than those that I had in student accommodation.
2. With the specialization of my degree beginning in the second year it will start to give me purpose and the degree as such is very unique considering that Sussex is specialized in non-symbolic i.e. non-standard AI approaches. I couldn’t do it anywhere else in the UK or in Germany.

What I still mostly lack are people who are likely to stay in Brighton. I know a few tango peeps, but those who stay and are not students like me are probably not more than a handful. What I need is something that will connect me to people, who are already rooted in Sussex. I already have ideas what to do to connect to more people:

• I will join Brighton’s Hackerspace: BuildBrighton (Visit them here), because they are mostly not students, but people who have real geek jobs in the area
• I will try and take up tai chi again if my health permits it – I don’t think I will connect with a lot of people there, but it will give a few places in Brighton a new meaning
• I will try to connect more strongly to the academic community at Sussex Uni, which has been rather unsuccessful so far, having been a first year undergraduate.

I hope that this will give me some opportunity to connect to people who won’t be gone by this time next year. Growing roots is not easy though: I’m not sure whether this approach will work and if I really considered all the hidden variables that are connected to considering a place your home. Maybe I’m missing out something crucial!

What do you think? Do you have your home all figured out? Is having lost sight of ‘home’ a result of globalization? Is considering a place your ‘home’ something you can plan like I’m trying to do here? Let me know in the comments section!