The Worst Year of My Life Taught Me That Home Can Be Found Anywhere

Bad things happen in threes, they say. I’m generally not superstitious, but perhaps no one is until you break a mirror or stumble across a penny shimmering on the sidewalk. 

Within a span of 10 days last spring, I was hit with one, two, three close and unexpected deaths. One happened before my eyes, how unsettling yet oddly peaceful. Another was a complicated parental figure, giving my mother the title of widow and making me question big feelings of unresolved conflicts and overall life complacency. 

The third, and most shocking, death was a boyfriend who broke my heart (counting on the conservative side) no less than 100 times. He was my first and hardest love, the one who had me up all night laughing some nights and crying on friends’ shoulders others. He was the one who, with a charcuterie board and a bottle of wine in between us, asked me to commit and all my instincts screamed don’t do it.

Years into our “love you, love you not” saga, I stopped telling my friends when we were together or not. You can sob to a friend about the first breakup, but not about the fourth. 

Ultimately, through his roundabout and all-wrong way of loving me, he taught me how to love myself.

These men were the most complicated figures in my life—names my therapist became intimately aware of on our first session. Within days of each other, they were gone. Not across town, with occasional run-ins that I could deal with (and mixed feelings I could try my best to deal with, too). Off this earth gone. The entire universe felt off balance as if the loss of their physical bodies turned the world wobbly. 

My go-to reaction for dark days is to crawl under the covers. As a creature of comfort—full-fledged Taurus over here—I would have expected to find comfort in the familiarity of my everyday routine and my home. Instead, the repetitiveness of certain stretches of highways, ones we had driven together, became burdensome. My favorite throw blanket turned itchy. My artwork, pieces I’ve always admired, seemed stale. 

Everything felt foreign, even my own sliver of a space in Minneapolis that I’d spent seven years tweaking to feel the most me. As a home and decor writer, I usually find ample joy in writing all day about ways to beautify your home. But rather than being comforted by the concept of home, I was lost in my grief and suffocated by my own belongings.  

I bolted. I left everything behind except a single stuffed suitcase. With a one-way plane ticket to Los Angeles and just a few changes of clothes, I hoped the shakeup of scenery would help satiate my overwhelming “life is short” feelings. I had no itinerary, no return date, no real place to call "home." I did have access to a friend’s beautiful and furnished home, which was sitting unoccupied in a palm tree-lined neighborhood.

"I don’t know, maybe three or four weeks,” I told friends when they’d ask when I’d return to Minneapolis. That was a year and a half ago.

In my quest to run away from home, I found it somewhere else. The space, both physically and metaphorically, from the little things that would trigger my grief helped heal my broken heart.

There’s something to learning new streets, admiring new flowers, meeting new friends, and learning the quirks of a new-to-you house. It balances a sense of belonging alongside curiosity, intimidation, and awe. Home isn’t the walls you live within—that’s a house.

A home isn’t made with a swipe of a perfect paint color or a comfy couch, as nice as those additions are. A home isn't an address or a style of architecture. Home is the sigh of relief when you open the front door—and that's where you find true sanctuary.

Someday, probably sooner than I’d prefer, I’ll have to return to Minneapolis to pack up my left-behind life. Whenever I’m ready, it’s waiting for me, a time capsule of a few items I miss (shoes, mostly) and many more I don’t even remember owning. 

But today, I feel like I found home, one that's truly my sanctuary—it was within me all along.