It feels like a treasure hunt that never ends. It feels like everyone is finding what they’re looking for and all you’re doing is starting over and it feels like it’s been forever since you’ve felt like you’re home, since you’ve felt safe, since you’ve felt warm because it always feels cold and lonely even in the middle of summer.

It’s draining. To pretend that you belong to a certain place or with certain people when you don’t, to pretend that you like and understand what they’re talking about but you can’t comprehend anything they say and it just feels like a scene you have to act over and over again, a lie you’re tired of telling because you no longer believe it and you no longer accept it.

It’s exhausting. Moving to new places, making new friends, trying to find new lovers, trying to survive yet be happy. It feels like a roller coaster; you love the thrill that comes with it, the high, the view from the top but then you fall and you scream and sometimes you regret the ride because it made you nauseous.

You try to find your place in the world but you get lost. You keep searching for a home but you always feel homeless. 

But you also don’t know how to stay when you should leave, you don’t know how to suck it up when it’s sucking the life out of you and you don’t know how to survive when you could thrive. So you take uncalculated risks and keep looking. You search for your home within strangers, within jobs, within friends, within yourself but you still can’t find it.

‘Where do I belong?’ You ask yourself every night and you never seem to have a solid answer.

But maybe it’s not about belonging somewhere, maybe it’s about un-belonging, it’s about detachment, it’s about letting go.

Maybe you’re not supposed to find your place because it wants to find you. Maybe you’ll just stumble upon it on a random day. Maybe you’ll win a trip somewhere and realize that it’s more than just a vacation and maybe it’s about letting go of all the things you want to run away from, of all the things that are holding you down. Maybe you’ll find your place when you learn to stay instead of running away.

And maybe you’ve found your home but you haven’t found the person you want to share it with, maybe all you need is someone by your side letting you know that the destination doesn’t matter because it’s the journey that counts. And maybe, just maybe, that person could be you, maybe you’ll soon discover that you’ve always held inside you the home you’ve been looking for.

Maybe your place in this world is your heart and you just need to dig deeper to find it. 

Rania Naim is a poet and author of the new book All The Words I Should Have Said, available here.