Carrie Mae Weems, Untitled (Woman and daughter with makeup), From The Kitchen Table Series, 1990
I remember the day my friend Giselle showed me this photo by Carrie Mae Weems. Glowing, she said that one day she wants this framed on her walls, in her own home.
That stuck with me. I see my friend in the little girl applying lipstick. If you know Giselle, you know how glamorous and stunning she is. Like the girl, she loves to play - but not just with makeup. Giselle is a life artist. She plays hard. We became friends quickly when we realised we both love pigeons. We both see the beauty in them - like in anything else. Giselle finds magic everywhere and in everything. In a slug softly scrolling along the pavement. In flakes of parmigiano on pasta. In the orange sunlight inside your eyelids. In paper mache creations that she makes with her hands.
Giselle is a magic finder and a magic maker. Hence, why I fell in love with her - and you will too.
I see Giselle and her mother in this image too. The two of them have a strong, beautiful bond. Being around them feels like home. It’s warm, inviting, it’s a sweet fragrance; and it’s safe.
When I asked Giselle if she would write a guest post for life letters, and she enthusiastically said she wanted to write about home, I thought of this photo she had shown me.
Home is something my friends and I talk about often. The pain of it. The joy of it. The search for it. The business of it. The confusion and misunderstanding of it. The longing. If you have been with me from the start, you have read the topic of home countless times on here.
The older I get the more I realise how much of a mosaic home is.
My friend found the perfect words to express just that:
“I made a home out of him. Believed that I had found it. The ever-elusive it. That I could now sleep deeper and breathe easier. Because of him. I wanted it so viscerally, like an itch yearning to be scratched. Only reached by something outside of me that I couldn’t claw within myself to get to. To get to this feeling of home.
But, he wasn’t it. Of course, he wasn’t it. So, I made new homes out of jobs and cities that wallpapered my mind. Just to realise the same. That maybe all of the poets and lyricists were right, that home can only be found within.
I took to my new realisation like a three-course meal, desperate to be devoured. Swallowing up books and truths. Following this map to return back to myself. No shortcuts. Much pain. Endless joy. Laughs that soundtracked my road trip back home. Then, I arrived. Not all at once. Over many years. Suitcases in hand of stories gathered, wisdom earned. Still arriving. With community and an abundance of magical experiences beating alongside me. As delicious as promised. A place I never thought I’d reach. 10/10 would recommend.
Yet, there’s a funny thing about reaching this home within. After spending a decade trying to get here. There’s a reconfiguration of the choices you make. The people you welcome into this home. The places and postcodes to situate this home in. The work to sustain it. The foundations to nurture it. Choosing the external places and rhythms that make you feel a sense of belonging, now feel different.
In my early twenties, it was easy, when I thought the answers were “out there”. Now, I know they’re in here, the itch no longer comes from within, the itch comes from environments and people that do not add to my foundations.
Right now, I feel an itchiness prickling onto each inch of my skin.
When you know what you need on the deepest level and your surroundings can’t offer it to you. When a lot of the people you meet can’t. The industries you work in can’t. The country you live in can’t.
All because I am no longer numb. All because I am home.
The choices from home aren't cute. They ask a lot of you. A shedding of flesh, ideas and beliefs.
Not as simple as escaping on the next flight or swiping into the arms of someone. Pretending that I belonged in places that I was too afraid to acknowledge that I never did.
The choices now come from my cells. Prodded with inquiry and depth.
But, mostly love.
I don’t want to place this home of me in the country I was born into.
I don’t want to place this home in the chests of people whose souls I can’t dance with.
I don’t want to knock on doors that refuse to open out of fear and bias.
I don’t want it.
The uncomfortable truth of it is this.
Home is a place within yourself but it is not enough.
Calling one person home is not enough.
Loving what you do but nothing else is not enough.
Just as a home has many rooms, our lives need many rooms.
When you build the home of you brick by brick.
The street you place it in matters. The neighbours matter.
The wind that blows through the door, the sun that kisses the windows.
It all matters.
It is now a choice that stems from truth instead of longing.
The story doesn’t end when the home of you is ready.
It is the beginning.
And as painful as it often feels, damn is it beautiful.”
I am not telling you what to do, but you should definitely engage with Giselle’s work. She offers one-to-one work as well as bigger classes and speaks at events across the world. And also, absolutely buy her book because it will change you. For the better.
PS: Petition to get her on Substack because for some weird reason, she isn’t (yet)!
Photo of Giselle by me.
"The uncomfortable truth of it is this.
Home is a place within yourself but it is not enough.
Calling one person home is not enough.
Loving what you do but nothing else is not enough.
Just as a home has many rooms, our lives need many rooms."
Whew!!! Thank you for these words. They are nothing but the absolute truth.
The world tells us that we should focus on the external achievements, relationships, career, health, material wealth. Finding the way home to ourselves is a life’s work