Home is where the hoarding is

Compulsion and consumption can't substitute connection.

I thought slowing down would simplify my life, but instead, I’m finding myself increasingly surrounded by… stuff. Everywhere I turn, objects and artifacts, clothes and books, but most of all, food and drinks. 

The fridge looks like I’m feeding an army and staying for a year, but I have to move out of this place next week. Most of the drinks I got for free–it comes with the job–but the amount I’ve accepted is excessive. The drawers are bursting with more farmers-market produce than one person could possibly consume. Scattered across the counter are spices, salts, and condiments, and from place to place, I’m toting a massive box of sauces, vinegars, grains, beans, and other edible remnants of my former life.

This is too much, but it’s what I equate with home and comfort: the place where keep your beer stash and your kitchen supplies; where can make those signature dishes that transport you to a time and place where you had more stability, a crew to gather around your table, where in hindsight you seem happier than you were. 

After all, our compulsions stem from the ways our parents and grandparents soothed themselves, epigenetically transmitted. What would comfort our caretakers in turn comforted us, and now we enact the same patterns without even knowing why. My ancestors found solace in massive servings of carbs, secret stashes of chocolate and nuts, lavishly laid tables, and at the bottom of glasses and bottles. So this is where I turn when I’m stressed; as I’m struggling to remember, re-integrate, and rebuild. I don’t know where I’m living next week, I can’t seem to stop overeating or finish a pitch, but at least I know where dinner is coming from.

In the Global North, we also live in a capitalist culture that preaches salvation through consumption from the moment we’re born. The answer is never less, just more of something different; you just haven’t found the right brand, the right drink, the right flavor. It shows up in my food shopping and cooking, as if enough heirloom peppers and bitter lettuce will fill the empty seat beside me; like the right proportion of harissa and ras el hanout will uncover the abuse I endured as a child. I know this, and yet the stuff continues to accumulate around me.

Compulsion and consumption is a replacement for connection: we are trying to fill a human-shaped hole with substances and stuff. Trauma, after all, disconnects you, transporting you from the present and perpetually into the past; reacting to new people and situations like those that once hurt you, keeping you separate. Traumatized parents and caretakers can’t properly bond with their children, so we spend the rest of our life seeking those connections in whatever form we can, using the methods and playing the roles that were demonstrated to us.

Even those who didn’t experience childhood trauma still come up in this separation culture: championing individual achievement, yet only supporting those who replicate the hegemony. We were never meant to live alone in empty boxes, so of course we end up stuffing them with stuff, and stuffing our faces when there’s no one to turn to. Social media is presented as a substitute for human interactions, and while it can help us stay in touch, it’s not the same thing as looking into another’s eyes; as skin on skin. And not all in-person interactions are created equal; as much as I love my industry interactions, they don’t serve the same need as a conversation with someone who truly sees and knows me. 

I also know that home isn’t a physical place, but rather, a feeling or a state of being. I know that freedom lies in cultivating that presence in my soul, the thing I can carry with me everywhere. I know the connection needs to start with myself, uniting disparate parts of my past, present, and future in the now. 

I know all of this. And still, I long to gather my friends around the table to help me eat some of this food and drink some of those beers.