Welcome to this tiny corner of the internet where an off-duty psychotherapist keeps the conversation going on how to make sense of this life thing we’re all doing. If you ever wondered what your therapist does off the clock—which, who among us hasn’t?—this is like that. Think of it as the adult equivalent of seeing your elementary school teacher at the grocery store picking out lemons. 🍋 I typically oscillate between long-form psychoeducation pieces and narrative essays—sometimes I smush them together. I also do a biweekly podcast with my husband, advice-adjacent pieces, roundups and most recently started a segment of brisk thoughts on music, TV, and film.
Today, a first in a series I’ll be doing periodically around the emotional landscape often a part of travel. I’m calling it psychotheratrips. I talk more about it’s origin story here, but basically exploring how we bring ourselves wherever we go. For instance, while it doesn’t pay for airfare, my anxiety joins me on most vacations as you’ll soon see…
There are a few places categorized under “home” in the file cabinet of my mind.
A small town in Northern Illinois, called Oregon, where I spent most of my formative years.
A cabin in Northern Wisconsin my family had my entire life until a few years ago. This place will always be home to me, even if I can’t ever go there again1.
Chicago, which held my 20’s, graduate school, the first few years of my career, the fostering of many friendships and the place I met my husband.
Denver, despite feeling very little soul connection to this place, is where my literal home and family reside, so spiritually this is home, home to me right now.
The home I’ll be rummaging around in my feelings about is Chicago. I took a trip there in April and what unfolded within me was a surprise. Traveling to a place I used to live always comes with a large side of discombobulation for me. Familiar and different.
I’m confused—Am I the person who lived here or the person I’ve become?
Of course, it’s both and neither.
It’s 6:12 p.m. the night before I leave for a weekend away in Chicago. No husband, no preschooler. Just me, my girls and my city…or so I thought.
I stand in our kitchen feeling this tightness in my chest. In a flavor of persistent intensity I haven’t felt for a very long time. It started a few days ago. I tried utilizing some Internal Family Systems (IFS) with this sensation.
Each night before bed, I spent time with this seemingly anxious part of me. I would let it know I’m not scared of it or mad at it–I mean parts of me are, of course, but not all of me. I would lie there, eyes closed, all bunched up in my pre-sleeping position repeating, “It’s OK that you’re here.” This sensation softened with me next to it. I eventually drifted off to sleep. However, this part was tight-lipped about what it wanted me to know. It must have wanted me to know something if it was banging around in my chest like, right?
As I did this most nights earlier this week, I almost cried each time. It wasn’t making sense to me. I notice maybe I was trying too hard. I’m authentically curious which is typically a good indicator I’m connecting with a part of me, but I’m also hella eager. Urgent, even. I wonder if it feels like I’m trying to get rid of it.
This spotting of urgency is something my husband and I learned from a child psychologist we worked with for our son. She gently reminded us that even if you are the most well-intentioned parent in the world just trying to help, kids don’t pick up on that nuance when you’re engaging with urgency. All they feel is your unease. In turn, interpreting that as you wanting something about them to change.
While parts of me are certainly displeased with this sensation, I honestly just want to understand it better.
My husband walks in the door eight minutes later. I lock eyes with him silently signaling, “I need you.” I verbalize that I’m noticing this anxious part (I try to say that rather than “I am anxious.”) and that I was near tears. He takes over dinner and Arch responsibilities so I can go in the other room.
I put a meditation on and fall into a light, brief sleep. When I come out of it, I hear, very clearly, “I’m scared you’re going to do too much on this trip. You’re really tired. I’m really tired. I want to be off. I don’t want to produce or be “on” the whole time. Do you promise to rest?”
She’s right. I have been filling every second with something. The minute I slow down, I feel like crying.
The next morning I text my husband on the shuttle to the airport:
“Just trying to be with my anxious part for now. It’s funny, I think she ultimately wants me to be calm but doesn’t know how to get there other than worry about everything and THEN I’ll be able to be calm. I just kept saying on the drive, “I got this. This is not your responsibility to manage.”
The more I sit with this, the more I concede that this anxiety has a point to startle me out of my nostalgic stupor. While Chicago was my home for almost a decade, it’s hasn’t been for almost six years. It’s familiar and it’s not.
I’m also going on my own. Even though most days I’m desperate for some alone time, I’m quite acquainted with not being alone. Tethered is more of the default setting these days. Which, sometimes, I resent. Now, I feel disoriented by the lack of tether.
One of the sides of being tethered is company. When I’m unaccompanied, I get treated so differently. Something about me when I’m on my own suggests it’s OK to cross a line or two.
People used to laugh in disbelief when I’d regale them with stories of how much I got talked to on the train. I’d have headphones in and a book in my lap and still people would engage and often in unpleasant ways. No one tells you about the dangers of the opposite of RBF: Resting Happy Face.2 People will say whatever the fuck they want to you, whenever they want. You seem so nice you couldn’t possibly have boundaries or a sense of self.3
As I fly through the air, another aspect of the anxiety that comes into view is this is the first time I’m going back to Chicago sober.
(Record scratch) “Wait what? We’re not drinking? Bitch, you’ve officially lost it. It’s Chicago. A metropolitan city. A work hard, play hard city. How are you going to blend? You’re just gonna show up as you are?”
By the next morning, after making it to the Airbnb I’m staying at with a friend and a good night’s rest, I was gathering a better sense of this part. But, honestly I was still a bit thrown off by all the crying it wanted to do.
I sit with my friend in a place we’ve been a dozen times before, Lula Cafe.4 In the exact bar stools we have sat in before —on days like the one where we picked out my wedding dress. As we talk, the anxiety finally breaks up into big tears. I begin to understand some of this pressure I feel in my chest was about how hard I tried while I lived here. Tried hard at everything, but especially how hard I tried to be enough.
I wonder if this may have been the first place I ever had a sense of being deeply seen/liked. I grew up in a town of four thousand people where I oscillated between feeling invisible and being the butt of a joke. The possibility that I’d ever make a life in Chicago and feel any semblance of belonging was never something I considered until it happened.
I said it was the first place I ever felt liked, which is true, but it was also the first place I figured out how to configure myself in such a way to make that feeling stick. How to be what it seemed other people wanted me to be. I got a hit of that sweet, sweet belonging and then worked like hell to protect it. So not true belonging a la The School of Brene Brown. What started as belonging became fitting in.
Not that it was all fake. Far from it. I was just trying on lives the way you do jeans. Some fit, some don’t. Sometimes the ones you like the look of the most, fit the worst. Sometimes they almost fit and you just shove yourself in them anyway knowing when you take them off later there will be indents all over your torso.
Chicago was a pair of jeans I really liked the look of. I love Chicago. Of the cities I’ve been to, it’s my favorite by far, by a landslide. This is my opinion–Don’t come for me. You tell me your favorite.
The tears were wishing I could have been different here in this place that I love. That I could have shown up as myself and been greeted with warmth. I now recognize I probably could have, I just didn’t believe that then. I couldn’t even meet myself fully back then. How could anyone else?
The knot in my chest loosens. She thought I needed her on this trip. I always did when I lived here. I needed her to worry, to anticipate ways I should pretend or contort. I don’t need that anymore—or let’s be more honest, I don’t need that as much. Now, that part could go do something else, like finding moments of calm for me.
A day later she plops me smack dab in the middle of Union Park. A place I’d been half a dozen times before for the music festival Pitchfork. I lean back and let the perfect Chicago spring day seep into my skin. My Apple weather app says it’s 67 degrees, but we all know that app is never right. I hear kids laughing and playing, the Green Line’s “doors closing,” a touch football game brings the slap of the ball, birds chattering, and yet this all also feels super quiet and serene to me.
I guess this may have always been here for me. There is some grief in that realization.
There is also some relief. Maybe it’s not too late—just maybe, my best days in Chicago are still ahead of me.
In my years as a psychotherapist, I’ve heard the phrase, “you can always go back” over and over. This is typically in reference to a few things. If, as the clinician, you missed something the first time around and didn’t marinate in a moment long enough. Or, you royally misstepped, you can always go back and talk about what happened and take accountability. Similarly with clients who feel they messed something up, a therapist may offer the idea that you can always go back and talk with your family member, friend or coworker. It’s rarely ever too late to try again.
I can’t speak for you, but I forget this so frequently it'd be a stretch to even say I know it at all.
It also flies in the face of what we’ve been told…
This idea of how fucked it feels to try to go home isn’t new. It’s a saying you’ve likely heard, “You can't go home again.” I was curious about the origin of this. It’s lived as a truth in my consciousness, as has Bon Jovi’s challenge to this in their song, Who Says You Can’t Go Home?
It turns out, Thomas Wolfe’s 1934 novel says so. Titled very on the nose for our purposes, You Can’t Go Home Again. In it, he writes about the allure of going home,
“But why had he always felt so strongly the magnetic pull of home, why had he thought so much about it and remembered it with such blazing accuracy, if it did not matter, and if this little town, and the immortal hills around it, was not the only home he had on earth? He did not know. All that he knew was that the years flow by like water, and that one day men come home again.”
I’ve scoured the internet for more on this and the consensus I found is you can’t go home because (1) places change and (2) so do we.
We expect when we travel somewhere we’ve never been to be confronted with new. But when it’s somewhere we’ve been before, especially somewhere we’ve lived, the expectation on some unconscious level is the place will stay frozen in time.
It’s sort of how we relate to the people in our lives. We can assume we know everything about them, missing what could be gleaned from what we don’t know, from what maybe already is. Most people dislike this human experience.
How often have you felt people are unable to see how you’ve changed, or conversely when someone is like, “Oh you’ve changgggged. How ghastly?” Nobody likes this, right?
What if instead, we met people and places—even ones we know intimately—with this energy,
“Tell me more about you and I’ll tell you more about me.”
I certainly agree that we change and places change. But what feels like it gets lost is the possibility of allowing this inevitable evolution to exist. Allowing ourselves to be changed by the change, if you will.
Sorry, Thomas Wolfe. I see what you’re saying, but I’m with John Francis Bongiovi Jr. on this one. If you’re willing to stay present to what is right in front of you and within you, who says you can’t go home?
Next week I’ll be continuing this conversation about questions we can ask ourselves before going home. Plus, specific personal favorites of one of my homes, Chicago. For now, images from the weekend where I felt all the feels with all my parts.
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F8f6d6d37-f586-4127-a518-cb7c6dc60fc3_3024x4032.jpeg)
Questions for you:
Where are the various places filed under home for you and why?
How have you felt this reckoning with returning home?
Do you believe you can go back?
You can find more info and my full disclaimer on my about page here. Abridged version: I’m a therapist, but not your therapist—even if you are a client of mine ~hi, dear one!~ this isn’t a session. dialoguing is an educational and informational newsletter only, not a substitute for mental health treatment.
Also, if you’re interested in submitting a question for the dialogue league, recent example here, please email me at dialoguingsubstack@gmail.com—or if you’re reading this via email you can just hit reply and send me a message. Love hearing from you for any and all reasons!
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I’ve thought about reaching out to the current owner to ask if I could pay to stay there for a weekend. I’ve been advised against this, but I’m still considering it. If anyone wants to encourage bad behavior, please go off in the comments about how much I should try.
If this concept resonates with you,
’s perfectly titled The infantilization of kind people is a beautiful exploration of how we treat kind people.As of the week I’m writing this, I have had no less than five encounters with people saying absolutely batshit things to my face–about my body, how I should or shouldn’t exit an elevator, someone who was not a doctor advised me about what I should do with my genetic skin condition. It’s absurd.
Also, shout out to Lula Cafe’s Coconut Banana Muffin because it’s the best I’ve ever had.
This is timely because I unexpectedly have to go home to Cleveland this weekend for a funeral. While I miss my family and home friends something terrible, I don't enjoy visiting home. I am reminded while there some of the reasons why I left in the first place. I'm always intrigued by folks who have a deep connection and sense of pride about where they come from because that isn't my experience at all.
A million thank yous for articulating and sharing something I've felt everywhere I've lived for as long as I can remember. The power of recognising yourself in someone else's words is startling and reassuring as I sit in very parallel feelings. It's also making me think more on the movies Past Lives and Brooklyn with how they tell stories about home/leaving home/making a new home through the lens of immigration. This writing is a gift 😌