The Elusive Idea of Home, Revisited

Some people believe that there are no coincidences. They connect seemingly unrelated events, conversations, and experiences, deciding that the universe or whatever higher power they believe in is trying to tell them something. I do not know if I believe that in every situation, but I might be willing to believe it this time.

Over the past few weeks, I have been having conversation after conversation about home. It has come up in discussions about identity and belonging with friends and acquaintances, as well as in the things I have been reading and writing. We always seem to circle back to what home means, where it is, and whether it is a place, a feeling, a person, or something else entirely.

After getting into yet another conversation about home this week, I decided it was finally time to finish this draft, which has existed in different scraps in my notes app for well over a year.

Before we go any further, I beseech you to put on Home by Machine Gun Kelly & co. If you cannot listen to music while you read, please listen afterward.

It is Thursday morning as I write this. I am working from home today, but I woke up far too early and could not fall back asleep. My mind wandered as it often does when it has too much freedom. First, I was thinking about summer travel plans. Then I found myself researching robot vacuums that can also mop floors.

Through a series of mental detours that, in hindsight, do not even make sense to me, I eventually started thinking about a talk I attended at my usual Wednesday night gathering. One of the speakers that evening (did I mention I was one of the speakers as well?) reflected on home and how her family’s constant relocation shaped her sense of belonging. Towards the end of her talk, she shared a story about being a teenager and being asked, “Tell me something nobody knows about you.” to which her response was, “I don’t have a home.”

She went on to discuss what it means to always be on the move, and how many expats and foreigners wrestle with the idea of home, sometimes as a place, sometimes as an identity, and sometimes as both.

Listening to her felt strangely personal, as though someone had found my journal, read through years of my scattered thoughts about home, and handed them to her as speaking notes. It is always so fascinating to hear people’s musings on things I am interested in, or have mused on myself, with people who care to listen to me talk about beautiful nonsense.

I listened with rapt attention as she gave this riveting talk, so it is not surprising that it did a number on me. Most notably, it took me back to a conversation I had with my ex in 2025.

…

I am a writer, which unfortunately means I am also something of a coward, as some of you already know. Since I have not yet managed to overcome my cowardice, whenever I have a choice between expressing difficult emotions through conversation and through writing, I almost always choose writing. Or, to borrow from Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, when one cannot speak, one should write. The problem is that I take that advice to an unreasonable degree.

One day, during a conversation with my ex, he asked me a question. I gave some rambling answer and realized at the end that I had not actually answered what he was asking. So, after the conversation ended, I did what I usually do, I opened a new note and started, “Dear xxx…”

As some of you also know, I do not know how to summarize…and so, what started as writing a few thoughts ended up as an essay, and towards the end, I wrote:

“While writing this, I also realized I don’t have a home anywhere, really. Not even in Nigeria.”

Upon further reflection after sending that to him and discussing it (because that’s what we did. I would write, then we would discuss; a very 21st-century relationship, hahaha), I realized this statement was an admission that “our” home felt much more like his home than mine. I had zero psychological ownership of the space. Nothing about it felt like me; it often felt like I was staying in a hotel rather than living in a home.

That was in 2025, and we have since broken up.

Before we parted ways, still wrestling with that statement in my personal musings, I created a page titled “What does home mean to me?” You might be surprised to hear that it is one of the shortest entries I’ve ever written (I guess I am capable of summarizing after all!).

For someone capable of writing thousands of words about almost anything, the page contains only a few structured lists, about seven short points. I could not answer what home meant to me because the more I thought about it, the more I realized that to answer that question, I first had to answer a different one: Why had I written that I did not have a home anywhere, and why is it so important to me to find?

Home became my own personal Atlantis, something I was convinced existed because I remembered what it felt like, yet somehow could never quite locate again. The more I thought about it, the more elusive it became.

I knew I had experienced home before because I knew what its absence felt like. But where exactly had I lost it? Where is home for me? Or had I spent years chasing an idea that had become larger and more perfect in memory than it ever was in reality?

Ajala the Traveler

To answer these questions, I have to go back in time. For the sake of keeping this somewhat manageable, I will start after primary school. I moved to Ayetoro from Abeokuta for my high school education, then moved back to Abeokuta some months after I wrote my WASSCE. Within a year, I moved to Benin for university. Four years later, I moved back to Abeokuta, and about a year after that, I moved to Ibadan. Within Ibadan alone, I moved houses three times. From Ibadan, I moved to England. From England, I moved to the Netherlands. Within England and the Netherlands, I changed cities multiple times.

It is not a staggering amount, but I am what my countrymen will still call, “Ajala the traveler.”

People hear a story like mine and often assume it must have been exciting, and to be fair, parts of it were. I have lived in places I never imagined I would live and met people I never would have encountered if I had stayed in one city all my life. I have collected experiences, memories, and friendships from different countries at different stages of my life. I would not trade those things for anything, but with this adventure also comes the downside of losing home.

Home as People

After the Wednesday night talk, the speaker and I spoke briefly. She mentioned something many people have told me over the years: that home is people, the communities we build, the friends we gather around ourselves, and the relationships that make a place meaningful. This claim happens to be true for many people, including some of those I have spoken with while writing this piece.

I understand the idea, and I think there is a lot of truth in it. I would even argue that I have experienced it myself. There have been moments when a person truly felt like home, and spending time with my family, either in person or over phone calls, gives me a sense of home, as I briefly touched upon in Conversations with Family.

The problem was never that people could not feel like home, but that I wasn’t staying put long enough somewhere to build the home with them. Every move I made came with a goodbye and a new set of people to eventually leave behind.

The friends I made in Nigeria, Amsterdam, and England are still my friends, but the distance now means planning in advance, checking calendars, and booking flights. As I write this, I am about to spend a weekend with my two lovely friends, Rachel and Shaunté, who will be coming down from Amsterdam. We started planning it weeks ago because work, time, and city logistics now have to be factored in since we are no longer ten minutes of cycling away from each other.

So, when people say home is people, I wonder, “What happens when you move?” or “What happens when they leave?” Perhaps these questions say more about me than they do about the idea itself, but if I am being honest about my own experience, I have to admit that defining home primarily through people is quite fragile. If home is people, then I have lost home over and over again.

Of course, there is another definition people like to offer, you know the one: “Home is where the heart is.” Now, if you have read my piece Once Again, Today My Life Begins, you will know that this is usually the point where I politely ask people to keep their inspirational quotes away from me. I understand what people mean when they say it, but I really, really do not care for it. In fact, as I write this, I am actively trying to resist the urge to roll my eyes.

The older I get, the more I realize that I need something slightly more concrete than that.

Home as Things

This brings me back to something else the speaker shared while we chatted after her talk. She explained how her mother created continuity through furniture. Every time they moved, her mother would ship their furniture to the next destination. The walls, house, and neighborhood might change, but the familiar objects remained, helping to recreate a feeling of home no matter where they lived. But I suppose this did not really help.

I remember looking at her and thinking that I could not relate to that experience either. Most of my moves happened with wheeled luggage containing whatever I considered important and practical enough to carry into the next chapter of my life, never with carefully curated belongings collected over decades.

Even if I had wanted to move stuff, I didn’t really have much to move. Because some of the places I lived were so temporary, furnishing them properly felt unnecessary. The two-bedroom apartment I lived in while in Ibadan is probably the best example.

The living room was barely a living room because I essentially just moved between my bedroom and home office, ignoring the rest of the apartment. The only things in there were a refrigerator gifted to me by a former colleague, a plastic table, a reading chair I took from my late brother’s apartment, and curtains that also came from his place. Without those hand-me-downs, the room would have been practically empty, and I did not even mind. In fact, I did not even notice anything was lacking until much later.

I never had the luxury of recreating home each time I moved. I was merely dwelling in a space, as a colleague mentioned while we discussed this. The places I lived were designed around leaving and moving light.

Looking back now, the one place that consistently felt like home throughout my life was my grandparents’ house. Perhaps it was because I spent so many formative years there, or perhaps it was because it remained constant while everything else seemed to change. Whatever the reason, that house occupied a place in my heart that no other house ever managed to. Whenever university holidays arrived, I would spend a few days at my parents’ house before making my way to my grandparents’.

Looking back now, I realize I was always making my way home. Even now, when I think about home, that house is often the first image that comes to mind.

Building a Life Un-Deferred

The more I think about it, the more I realize that home has occupied a disproportionate amount of space in my imagination for as long as I can remember. I am always thinking of home, and when I say home, I do not mean Nigeria.

It is also quite interesting, and perhaps sad to some people, to admit that many of the things society traditionally associates with adulthood and being a woman close to thirty (at least I am not thirty yet, yay!) never really interested me all that much. Home, however, was different.

Since moving away from my grandparents to resume high school at Ayetoro, with the hope of recreating something that felt like home, I remember constantly rearranging my room. I do not mean occasionally moving a chair from one corner to another. Every few months, I would become convinced that the room would be perfect if I just moved everything around one more time, constantly shifting the shelf, the bed, and the reading chair. I was forever experimenting with different layouts. I did not even know what I was trying to do then, but I do now.

To be fair, not much has changed since I was a teenager. I remember that in Amsterdam, I was constantly moving the pieces around in “my room” because it was the only space I had any liberty over. At one point, the cleaner said, “Oh, I like this new layout,” and before she came back two weeks later, I had moved things all over again, lol!

You could argue that this is my restlessness rearing its head, or my inability to leave things alone. You could even argue that I am incapable of being satisfied. All of those arguments would be correct because I possess these flaws in beautiful proportion.

But underneath all the rearranging, I was never imagining a house simply as a structure. I was imagining a home: a place that reflected me, filled with things I loved, arranged according to my habits, my personality, and my peculiarities at the time. The books on the shelf, the photographs and art on the wall, the furniture, the little objects people collect for no reason other than the fact that they make them happy, all of it says something.

I think I have always wanted a home that said something about me, a place where someone could walk in and immediately understand things about me that I refuse or struggle to express verbally. For a very long time, no amount of rearranging gave me that… until now.

…

Therefore, I would say, this stage of my life is incredibly significant, because now, not only has my life begun once again, my home is also now being created.

It isn’t because I have finally found the perfect apartment; trust me, it is not perfect. The space feels almost like a hospital or a greenhouse, as a recent “guest” kindly informed me. There are still things I want to change, and I am still debating over furniture, art, and pictures. But despite what is missing and what I have now added, for the first time in a very long time, I am building a space without immediately calculating how difficult it will be to pack everything when I leave. How would I even move my sofa, lol! Let’s just say the stress of moving will probably keep me here for the foreseeable future.

However, while I build my permanence, I also have people who question me. A friend visited recently and expressed her shocked at how much I had done with the apartment in such a short amount of time. She walked around looking at everything, asking variations of the same question. “How have you done all this already? Didn’t you move just a few weeks back?” They were all nice questions, until she asked the one I suspect many people would ask: “What happens when you get married?”

Alagba!

I was standing by my kitchen counter at this point, a vantage point to look around the living room. By the time I looked back at her, I asked: “What changes?”

And then, because my brain likes to explore every possible scenario before settling on one, I followed it up with another question: “What if I don’t?” (My family don’t want to hear this, but oh well…)

As I mentioned earlier, I do not fully subscribe to the things women are traditionally expected to care about. I have never fully understood the idea that women should postpone living their lives while waiting for some future version of life to arrive. First, it is your parents’ house. Then it is the house you will eventually share with your husband. Then it is the life you will eventually have.

Everything is always deferred because you are always waiting for a green light from someone else. Imagine a whole human being with free will deferring their life because of a future partner.

What if I remain single for the next ten years? Twenty years? The rest of my life, because I am just too awesome to be partnered up? hahahha. Am I supposed to spend all that time living halfway? Am I supposed to postpone the things that matter to me because someone who may or may not exist has not yet entered the picture?

That sounds exhausting and tragic. My tombstone would read something like, “The human who waited…” What a lovely movie title that would make.

There is also another side to it. What if I meet someone tomorrow? What then? I still do not want a life that only begins when he arrives. I do not want to look back and realize that for even a second, I waited for permission to become myself. The things that matter to me should matter regardless of who is standing beside me. I want the life I am building to be mine first, and quite frankly, I do not want to attract the kind of man who believes my life should have remained in limbo until he appeared.

Don’t get me wrong, I do not reject partnership, far from it. But I believe the healthiest partnerships are formed by people who are already living. Partners should complement you, not complete a half-lived life.

The Rebellion of Staying

Besides this, you may also wonder about the urgency my friend noted when she mentioned I had done a lot in a short time. In reality, it is not urgency, but rather my striving for permanence. Or perhaps permanence is the wrong word, because I know better than most that life is unpredictable.

It is almost a fool’s errand because I cannot guarantee that I will live in this apartment for the next 1 year. I don’t even know where I will be next week, but what I can do today, right where I am, is stop building my life around the possibility of leaving.

…so, when I say what I feel now is significant, I mean that for the first time in more than a decade, I am not merely trying to convince myself that I am allowed to stay somewhere; now I actually believe it.

Now, I am actively trying to unlearn this “new normal.” I am asking my siblings for pictures so I can put them on my walls. I am spending far too long deciding where a chair should go. I am agonizing over where a wall art should hang, even having “my guest” redrill the wall because the dimensions weren’t right (By the way, if you are reading this, thank you for the improvisation you did with hanging this art after one of the main anchors fell off.).

Art hanging beautifully in the entryway after hours (re)drilling and agonizing over the best placement

Every time I buy something simply because I like it rather than because it is practical, like the somewhat cute but unnecessary bowl I now put fruit in on my dining table, it is a small act of rebellion against the version of me that always kept one foot out the door.

…

As I sit here writing this, I realize that what I have been searching for all these years is exactly what I feel right now. This feeling is what makes this house a home.

It might also explain why I guard this space with more ferocity than I guard my heart. My heart has survived disappointment before, and it will survive again, but my home might not.

It is a sacred ground. It is one of the few places where I have total psychological ownership, and I get to exist exactly as I am. It is where I recover from difficult days, where I work, where I think, and where I write, just as I am currently writing this from the recliner in my bedroom while intermittently staring outside.

It is where I can leave a wall empty because I want to, or fill a wall because I want to. It is where I can dance badly in the kitchen. It is where I can walk around naked if I feel like it and risk traumatizing whichever unfortunate neighbor accidentally looks through the wrong window. It is where I am most myself.

…and I hope that when people visit, they see that. I hope they see pieces of me scattered throughout the apartment in the great and little details, and in the strange choices that make perfect sense to me and absolutely nobody else.

And so, as I wrap up this very long piece, I accept and respect that we cannot all agree on the definition of home. However, I realize that while in 2025, I wrote that I did not have a home anywhere, not even in Nigeria. Today, I do not think I would write that sentence again. I have not answered every question about what home means to me, but I am getting closer to finding its full meaning, though I fear it will keep evolving over time.

In the meantime, I am creating a space that reflects who I am at this moment and making room for a future that exists in the present tense. After years of packing my life into boxes and carrying it across cities and countries, what I am doing now is no small feat.

I am home. And when I say “I am going home,” after a day out, I mean it, both literally and figuratively.

My Monstera says hi