Coming Home to Me: I knocked, and I answered.

What is home?
Is it the house where you first learned the language of love, where your mother’s footsteps reassured you in the night and your father’s voice steadied your fears?
Is it the laughter of siblings, the smell of a familiar kitchen, the quiet certainty of belonging to people who knew your name?
Or does home arrive later, in chosen places — the corner of a classroom where you make your first friend, the first apartment where the furniture is mismatched but the freedom is intoxicating, the arms of someone whose heartbeat becomes the safest roof you’ve ever known?
And yet, what happens when those homes crumble?
When the family house no longer fits, when friendships drift, when love collapses, when foreign countries promise belonging but leave you stranded in the almost of it all?
What happens when every door you knock on stays closed, and even the walls you build for yourself no longer feel like shelter?
This book is born from those questions. It is a map of the search for belonging — not the belonging others give you, but the belonging you spend a lifetime chasing.
It begins with the first walls that shaped me, the childhood safety I believed would last forever. It follows me as I outgrew those walls and wandered further, searching for new rooms in friendships, schools, lovers, cities, countries.
It leads through heartbreak, through the ruin of a home I thought unshakable, through nights of invisible homelessness where no place and no person could hold me.
And then, slowly, it circles back — to the quietest of knocks, one that had been sounding all along, from the inside.
A reminder that perhaps home was never only outside of me. Perhaps the truest home was always within, patient, waiting for me to turn the key.
These pages are not only my story, but an invitation. As you read, you may find pieces of yourself in these walls — the homes you’ve inherited, the ones you’ve built, the ones you’ve lost, and the one you may still be searching for.
So I ask you, before you begin:
Where have you felt home?
Which homes have abandoned you?
Which homes have saved you?