HOME

“Where we love is home - home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts”

-Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Most people, when asked about the word home, contort a complete picture in their minds of their meaning for it. Whether it's a person, a place or a thing, people usually have one certainty in their life that they can call home. I on the other hand never had that assurance. When thinking about home, all that comes to my mind is a series of blurry pictures, and a feeling of confusion to go with it.
Born in Bahawalpur, but living in the bubble of a community where my dad worked in northern Sindh, I wasn’t sure of the place I was supposed to call home for as long as I can remember. However, too young to care about such a thing, I always considered home to be the place where all my friends were, the place where I went to school, and the place that held all my precious belongings. But soon that thought was changed forever.
When I was in year 5, my parents decided to move to Qatar in order to avail the better opportunities that the world had to offer. It was a unique experience altogether, living in a place surrounded by people from so many different cultures all around you. Coming from a developing country, it felt a little strange to see that the things considered luxuries back home were almost categorized as needs there. It made me feel like the people there were given much more than they deserved, and that this made them somehow worse than the humble people I had known in Pakistan. It was just one of the many things that made it seem impossible for me to feel like I could affiliate with them. Eventually, though, I started to feel a sense of fitting in there, a strange feeling of similarity amongst a crowd of people who were almost aliens to me.
But that feeling still wavered every time I visited Pakistan. When I visited my friends and family and my childhood home, the confusion relating to home came back because wasn't this where I belonged? In the place where I was born, surrounded by people like me that I had once known so well...
So it was a struggle I had to face once a year. And eventually, with time, I started to feel less familiar with Pakistan and more with Qatar. I no longer knew those people as well as I used to, didn't like the same things as them, and didn’t know the same things as them. I started to feel like a foreigner in my own country, not being able to relate to anything that happened there or with those people anymore. And even though the feeling was a bit worrying, I can't deny that I was also slightly relieved that I finally had one place to call home again.
However, life is full of surprises, and at the age of 18, I came across yet another big one. Faced with the tough choice of choosing a career and a university to attend to, I decided, to my own surprise, to come to Pakistan for further education. It was a choice hardly supported by anyone I knew, including myself at times, but it somehow felt like it was about time for me to revisit my roots. So once again, I moved to a mostly unfamiliar place.

This time though, it was even harder to adapt, since I wasn't living in a largely diverse community that I was used to being in. The dreaded feeling of being an outcast came back, I felt like I couldn't fit in with anyone around me. I was yet again the foreign girl in a country that should have been home to me. My ideas didn’t seem to match with anyone around me, making me afraid for my every action being taken the wrong way, fearing judgment just for being myself. Over the year and a half, I've tried my best to conform, to neutralize in the country that I supposedly belong to. It has been a tiresome process, one that seems never-ending at a time, and even though I may not feel like an outsider anymore, home will probably always be a strange concept to me, one that I will never have a complete picture of.
And the fact that it’s so hard for people like us to fit in is a testament to what is wrong with our society. People are afraid to be themselves because they might not live up to the society’s idea of “normal” or “well behaved”. And in the process of fitting in, so many amazing people are lost, so many great ideas diminished and so many bright minds put out. Considering this fact, it’s no wonder we stand where we did many years ago while the rest of the world is pulling ahead.
And as far as my quest for home is concerned, I think I’ve finally made peace with my uncertainties because as Warsan Shire said, “At the end of the day, it isn’t where I came from. Maybe home is somewhere I’m going and never have been before.”