‘This path leads to somewhere I think I can finally say, I’m home’

By David McElroy · October 27, 2019

I don’t know how to get home. I’m not sure I’ve ever been there.

I’m not from this place. Not really. Yes, I was born here. On this planet, in this state, not far from where I sit. But I look around and know with certainty these are not my people. I don’t really understand them and they don’t understand me. We might as well be from different planets.

I’ve been looking for home since I was a small child. We didn’t stay any place for very long. From the beginning, it was a painful blur.

Birmingham, Washington, Atlanta, Knoxville, Meridian, Anniston, Oak Grove, Pensacola, Jasper.

It was a long line of new places, new people, new situations. I had a mother, then I didn’t. I had stability, then I didn’t. I craved love and attention and approval, but being perfect was the only way I knew to pursue them. And I wasn’t perfect.

I’ve longed for something all my life. I didn’t know what to call it. I’ve longed to find my home.

Every now and then, I still think of a song that a woman wrote 10 years ago which she said was inspired by her feelings about me. I’ve had it on my mind today, because it’s about the idea of home.

She was half of a duo which had been professionally singing in her area for years. She wrote and recorded this song as a simple demo. I have no idea whether she ever fully developed it and performed it, because the group broke up shortly thereafter when she moved to England for graduate school.

I had known her years before this, but we hadn’t pursued a relationship at the time. We were too far away from one another. I’m not sure why else. But in 2009, she got back in touch with me to see whether I was still interested — and we started talking all the time.

But the timing was terrible. I was in the middle of grieving about another relationship which had just ended. My heart was still somewhere else, so I wasn’t willing to let anything serious develop with her.

When she wrote to tell me about the song she had written, she told me why I had inspired the song. She said she hadn’t made the lyrics obvious enough for anyone else to know what they were about, but she said they were about me.

“David, I miss you,” she wrote that day. “Since we’ve been speaking again this past half year, you’re always on my mind. I dream about you, think about you and fantasize about you — or about ‘us,’ I guess. I’m not saying that that is good or bad. I’m only telling you what goes on in my private world.”

And then she sent the demo of the song.

The chorus is what I’ve kept coming back to in the 10 years since — and I’ve come to understand it more deeply as the years go by.

I’m sick of running
I’m sick of losing my way
This path leads to somewhere
I think I can finally say
I’m home, I’m home, I’m home

Nothing came of that relationship. The reasons don’t matter. I haven’t spoken with her for close to 10 years. We’ve gone completely different directions.

But I understand now why she made the connection in the lyrics between home and me, even though nothing about me had been literal home to her. I understand why the lyrics were about longing to see me — and then me meeting her at a station. But mostly, I understand why she equated all of that with finally being home — after years of running and losing her way.

Home isn’t a place. Home is someone who truly loves you.

And that’s why I’m still longing for the home I’ve always needed.

Share on Social Networks

The better I know myself, the more I realize that my core fault — and the source of many other failings in me — is that of believing on a deep level that everyone and everything in my world must be perfect, especially me. If I had seen any of this in myself as recently as 10 years ago, I would have dismissed it as a small failing that showed up only every now and then, but I now see it as the wellspring from which my other sins are born. It’s such an insidious belief — and one that can look on the surface like a reasonable desire to be good and right — that it’s hard to acknowledge it as the inner cancer it is. But until I understood this, it was always going to be impossible for me to get over my deep shame about my imperfection or to accept the love of another person, because she is bound to be flawed, too.

If it’s not yet spring where you are, you can at least enjoy 60 seconds of spring in the South with me. This was just outside my office late Thursday afternoon. Don’t you need a relaxing break today? See it on YouTube by clicking here.

It pays to be nice to the employees at Walmart — and everywhere else, for that matter. I was just in Walmart to buy some kitty litter when one of the employees called me over with a conspiratorial tone: “Hey, David, do you need some toilet paper?” she almost whispered. She had found a giant package hidden somewhere and she said she had been saving it for someone she really liked. So I’m the proud new owner of 24 additional mega rolls of toilet paper, which are worth something like $748 on the black market. On a more serious note, be good to people when you have a chance, as this employee was for me. And remember that people remember the way you treat them. I wouldn’t have treated this woman and her co-workers a bit differently in the past if I’d known she would someday do me this small favor, but there are benefits to treating people well, even if that’s not your purpose. Be good to each other.

My neighbor Cora — a retired teacher — called me while I was driving to the office earlier today to remind me that she wants to take me out to dinner sometime. We’ve talked about going out together, but we’ve never gotten around to coordinating a time. As she was about to get off the phone, she said, “I love you. You’re such a good neighbor!” And I told her that I loved her, too. I wonder how upset the racists of the unquestioned Jim Crow world — only about six decades ago — would have been that a white man and his elderly black neighbor care abut each other in such a way. There’s still a lot wrong with racial attitudes in the world today, but small things such as this remind me that we’ve come a long way.

If you have children, it’s important to deal with how they might be feeling as they react to the fears of COVID-19 as the danger grows. There’s a lot of fear among adults right now, but children are even less equipped to handle fears they sense from adults around them. My friend Josh Whitman has experience doing a lot of things and one of them is school administration. Josh and his wife are raising two young sons of their own in a Birmingham suburb, and he’s been thinking a lot for the last few weeks about how this societal fear affects children. He’s written a short article giving some wise and insightful tips with concrete steps you can take to help your children during this time of crisis — things which might not have occurred to me — so I highly recommend it.

Related Posts