What Does Home Mean to You: [Essay Example], 1251 words (2024)

Many ask, "what does home mean to you?" For me, home is not just a place…it’s a feeling.

“What I love most about my home is who I share it with.”

“There is nothing more important than a good, safe, secure home.”

“Home is a place you grow up wanting to leave, and grow old wanting to get back to.”

Home is where I was raised. Where I played, laughed, cried, and learned. It is where I grew. Where I became me, a strong, intelligent woman, confident in myself, in my future and in my past.

I believe that a home is more than four walls and a roof over head. Home is an environment. It is the feeling that greets me when I walk through the door. It is the people who wait for me to get home. My home is my rock-solid foundation, and I will take it with me when I leave. I believe that home is where individuals become themselves, not primarily physically but mentally. It becomes a mold that forms who they are.

Home for me is made of experiences, moments of my life that helped to change me and to teach me. For that reason, my home is also people and when home takes on a human form, it is called family. I believe that family is a relative term, nothing to do with blood, defined by relationships. No matter where I go in the future, my foundation will always sit firmly in this environment and with these people who have formed me as a person and taught me how to live. I know that I can always come home. After all, home is where the heart is.

No matter where I go in the future, my foundation will always sit firmly in this environment and with these people who have formed me as a person and taught me how to live. I know that I can always come home. After all, home is where the heart is. By definition – A house is a building built for habitation where as a home is an abode built for one’s family. But a home is something more special than that. A home is a place, where you feel comfortable. A house is just shelter. A home is a place that one loves to live in, but a house one just lives in. A home is built with a family, but a house has no intentions of family life. “A house belongs to you, but you belong to a home.”

When you go through the newspaper, you find many houses for sale. Sometimes at street corners, you find signs saying that there is a house available for rent. A house is a place in which people live. It offers shelter. There may be thousands of houses in the city in which you live, but there is only one, which you call your home. The house which your family choose to live in becomes your home. The builder only constructed a house. When you moved in, it became your home. Home is the place where your family is. It provides emotional warmth and security. A house, on the other hand, provides shelter. Usually people buy a home and sell a house. People who are away from their home often complain about being homesick, not housesick. What they lack is not a roof over their head, but the emotional warmth and security. Nowadays, every city has a home for the aged. They are not called house for the aged because these places provide not only shelter but also emotional comfort for the old people. Other common expressions in English are: There’s no place like home, Home, sweet home, and Home is where the heart is. Nobody ever substitutes the word house in any of these expressions.

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With seconds to spare, I take a swift glance at my boarding pass. Like a dog restlessly looking for a shelter during a storm, I drag myself through the frenetic sea of people, attempting to not be deserted in one of the most populated city in the world: Mumbai.

Thankfully, I manage to board my flight seconds before the gate closes, without being turned into a waffle – phew. As I walk through the Jet Bridge into the plane, the flight attendant welcomes me aboard with a “Hello”. I respond back with a smile while jumbling two bags at the same time. It’s finally the time to leave home forever, leaving everything behind, for a totally new journey.

It is the spring of 2014, and my parents are ready to leave, with all the luggage nicely packed and ready to go. I exchange a last few goodbyes with my friends, and everything that I would have to leave behind. In a matter of few days, I would be in a completely different land, with different culture, different food, different language, different people, different everything.

So where is home? In the place I am living, or in the place where I will be in a few days? Vadodara or in a foreign land called Chicago? Like a broken compass, I can’t decide my true north.

Unresolved, I decide to turn to my all time favorite novel, Divergent, for a second read. I somehow manage to locate it between heaps of boxes – torn out with a few pages missing. People say that the best books tell you the things you want to hear – echoing your thoughts and beliefs. As my eyes scroll through the words, I feel like my exact thoughts are spelled out on creased papers. The dilemma that Beatrice was facing seemed to exactly match that of mine : Stay within abnegation like she has done for her whole life, or move to Dauntless for a better future? I felt like Veronica Roth stole words straight out of my mind — mimicking the same exact situation as I am in. All of a sudden, I find myself in the plane, between Mumbai and Chicago – belonging to nowhere.

I keep reading during the course of my flight. Despite the high speed of the plane, my eyes trace the words like a laser. I feel like I should be distracted, especially with the man in front of me who is snoring extremely loudly, but I am not. As I finish reading the final few words, I close the book, and place it underneath my seat in my backpack.

Realizing that both of my parents were asleep, I stare out the window, looking at the beautiful farms – It feels like everything has slowed, and time has paused in the moment. I suddenly feel a burst of content, happy, relaxing energy inside me.

This is my home. I am at home between Vadodara and Chicago. I am from both : Vadodara and Chicago. I speak both English and Gujarati. I like to use Gujarati for math and science, but I prefer English for labeling my emotions, art, and descriptions. My childhood lies in India — filled with endless visits to the park by my home, blockbuster movies, and countless amount of cricket games with friends — while my adolescence lies in US, filled with fast paced social life, beautiful pine trees, and competitive speed skating.

My daydream has given me the answer : Home is neither arrival, nor departure — Neither America, nor India. It is in between, in the cusp — that is where I feel the most satisfied, the most content.

Works Cited

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2. Boyd, H. W., & Ray, M. J. (Eds.). (2019). Home and Identity in Late Life: International Perspectives. Policy Press.
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4. Clark, C., & Murrell, S. A. (Eds.). (2008). Laughter, Pain, and Wonder: Shakespeare's Comedies and the Audience in the Playhouse. University of Delaware Press.
5. Heidegger, M. (2010). Building, Dwelling, Thinking. In Poetry, Language, Thought (pp. 145-161). Harper Perennial Modern Classics.
6. Kusenbach, M. (2003). Street Phenomenology: The Go-Along as Ethnographic Research Tool. Ethnography, 4(3), 455-485.
7. Moore, L. J. (2000). Space, Text, and Gender: An Anthropological Study of the Marakwet of Kenya. Routledge.
8. Rapport, N., & Dawson, A. (Eds.). (1998). Migrants of Identity: Perceptions of Home in a World of Movement. Berg Publishers.
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10. Seamon, D. (Ed.). (2015). Place Attachment and Phenomenology: The Synergistic Dynamism of Place. Routledge.

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