This Must Be the Place

Psychotheratrips: Chicago (part two)

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, roundups and most recently started a segment of brisk thoughts on music, TV, and film.

This is part two 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 its origin story here, but basically it will be addressing how we bring ourselves wherever we go. If you didn’t catch part one “Can We Really Never Go Home?” you can read that here. The TL;DR is yes, you can, if you’re willing to stay present to what is right in front of you and within you. Today, we will explore ways to actually execute staying present with ourselves and the context.

---

I have this vivid memory of returning home as a kid. Well I guess it’s less a single memory and more a string of memories. Feeling the bump, bump, bump of us clearing the lip of the curb. Signaling we’ve transitioned from the street to our driveway. My dad reaches up to click the garage door opener and without fail, every single time he’d say, “home again, home again, piggity jig.” 

I never thought to ask what that meant or where it came from. It was just a thing my dad said. There are lots of those. Paulisms. 

I was a bit horrified later in life to discover, while watching Blade Runner, not only was this a nursery rhyme other people knew, the saying is actually home again, home again, jiggity jig.

To this day, I don’t know if my dad got this from the nursery rhyme or from Blade Runner. With him, either is equally plausible.

One thing I kept wanting to say last week but couldn’t find a good place to slot it in was how much I’ve always loved going home. Going back to a place that once was home, or even places that simply felt like home—a friend’s kitchen or front porch.

As long as there has been a place to go back to in my life, I’ve known this feeling. You may be thinking this is just garden variety nostalgia. Maybe it is, maybe it’s not. Who knows? All I know is that I’ve always craved the warm embrace of familiarity.

We moved when I was ten from one smaller-ish midwestern town to another. I remember daydreaming of going back there almost immediately. I was curious if it was still how I remembered it? Did I make it all up?

Last week, in the comments section and on the pod a conversation broke out around how home is so much more than a place, its a feelinggggggg. Y’all after my heart. Y’all flirting with me now. You’re right. It so is. Gosh, I love when I’m not the one who has to say these things. 

As I continued to widen how I held the concept of home in my mind, it got me thinking about something from our wedding ceremony back in 2017. Our officiant, my dear cousin David, sweetly made a binder of everything he did during the ceremony so I have verbatim what was said. He wrote,

“Interestingly enough, as I was corresponding with them over these past many months, they each independently described the other as home.” 

So, while it’s emotionally true that home is a feeling within us, I also hoped last week after writing part one, that there is a more gentle way to be with ourselves when we inevitably return to places that once felt like home. The fun thing about what follows is that I personally think you could apply these reflections to situations beyond traveling home. A multi-faceted bop.