All I Wanted Was A Home Of My Own

Well, I guess we’re living in a pandemic.

It’s an odd thing to say? I’m the sort of person who games out apocalyptic scenarios in the milliseconds between a red light and an oncoming car, but somehow, I didn’t anticipate that “the end of the world“ would be so… banal.

I’m a couple days out from graduating with my third degree. I’m waiting on work approval for my post-graduate OPT. I’m writing a newsletter with a new friend. I’m dating a woman I met on an app. I’m squatting in the spare bedroom of my aunt’s house.

I’m spinning in circles, marking time.

With everything going on in the world, the hardest thing about this virus has been my inability to plan. It is the summer in LA. There were things I wanted to do. Trips I wanted to take. Places I wanted to see. Instead I am stuck in suburbia without a car, away from the people I care about, unable to return to the country I grew up in and I feel stuck.

More than anything, I embarked on this new phase of my life because I wanted to expand it. I have always been a dreamer. I imagined a big, wide world that I could inhabit and fill up with my feelings and my musings and my accumulated wisdom. Being in LA has made my world feel infinite—full of possibility. The city has been good to me and I am so eager to make it my home.

But instead, I am stuck. Stuck without a job, stuck without an income, stuck without a home. And all I have ever wanted was a home that was mine.

Next month I will turn 30. I grew up on a lifetime of programming that told me turning 30 was the end of the line. I would be washed up and useless and old and forgotten. But, besides the fact that 30 is basically an infant in adult years, I was (am?) looking forward to the milestone. Birthdays are a sore spot for me and I was so looking forward to celebrating in style. Collecting my new friends and allowing them to make me feel good about all I have achieved in my life. 2020 was supposed to be my year. I like nice round numbers that are divisible by 5. Turning 30 in 2020? It was practically written in the stars for me.

Instead I will probably spend my birthday watching a movie and eating a sad cake I can’t blow the candles out on and being secretly resentful that I couldn’t do more. There is so much that I have given up on by virtue of being a millennial. I will never own a home. I will never retire. I will probably never get married. I will definitely never have kids.

But I can forgive all that. I do not need much and I am not asking for a lot. All I want is a life that is good and healthy and mine. I just want a small apartment I can fill with plants and books and art and clean all in one day. I want a place that is a refuge and a haven. A place that reflects the person I am and who I want to be. I want a place that is just enough to contain the multitudes that spring from within me.

I want something that is mine.

When this is over I will be fine. I am lucky. I have family. I have support. I have people who will not let me fail. But I do not want to be reliant on them. I want to be a person. I want to support myself. I want to be able to support other people without worrying about myself.

I worry that I will become a burden and I will have to go home and this will all have been for nothing. I worry that the grandest adventure I ever embarked on will result in wonderful new discoveries about myself and no way to implement them. I worry that I will have worked, and cried and bled, only to end up right back where I was before, in my mother’s house, in my childhood bedroom, wishing for a wider world.

It does not feel like a lot to ask for the small luxury of something that is mine. I ache for some semblance of control. Even if all I can control resides within a tiny square inch I have to rent from someone else. There is so much this pandemic will be taking from me but I am so much luckier than so many others that I hesitate to complain.

But I never asked for much.

All I wanted was a home of my own.

I should get to have it.