You don't live here anymore.
On homes and identity and belonging
One of the secrets to staying sane in these outrageous times is sharing, because sharing your stuff will make you less lonely. I wrote a whole book about it!
At the end of last year, I fell asleep on an airplane and had a dream so vivid that I’m writing about it six months later.
First, some brief backstory:
In early 2021, I told my husband Jeff that I wanted to move. We’d lived in our beautiful home in the Los Feliz area of Los Angeles for 11 years, but I felt an urgency to make a big change. A few reasons were logistical: our 1920’s house was in need of extensive renovations that I wasn’t eager to take on, and it was across town from our kids’ school and social communities, which mattered more and more as they approached the teenage years.
A few other reasons for wanting to move were emotional: we’d spent over a year holed up in the house together during the pandemic lockdown and I think we were all craving a change of scenery. And also we’d been robbed in a home invasion in broad daylight in 2018, and, frankly, I never got over it.
So, in February of 2021, just two days before my first book came out, with emotions running high, we toured a house in our dream neighborhood. By the end of the week we’d made an offer. Everything happened fast. We sold the Los Feliz house to the first couple who looked at it, and by the spring the moving trucks were booked and ready.
In the meantime, I was silently panicking. I was the one driving the move, but when everything flowed so easily, I wanted to pump the brakes. Unlike a person who sees ease as a green light from the universe, my anxiety interprets ease as suspect. Time to second-guess. Time for the other shoe to drop. What horrors will await us as this thing happens that I really wanted to happen?
I’ve always been this way. I cannot trust the good things as they unfold. Lately (for whatever reason), I keep thinking about how badly I wanted to be the editor of the middle school yearbook in 8th grade. But after I was bestowed the honor at an assembly in front of the whole school, I did my own 1992 version of “quiet quitting” where I just…didn’t do the job. I cared so much about doing it well that I didn’t do it at all. 30+ years later and it’s still one of my great shames. That story probably deserves its own essay.
I know this is a form of self-sabotage. A fear of success. You ain’t got to tell me what fifty self-help books already have. And yet. It remains a pattern.
But anyway, we did move. It was mostly uneventful except my body freaked out and I kept having “allergic reactions” (I don’t have any allergies) and ending up in the urgent care for bizarre symptoms, but I mean it was fine.
We started living our new life in our new-to-us house and I told everyone how great it was while secretly feeling like I was squatting in someone else’s space. I was homesick for the Los Feliz house. It felt like we were on a trip and I kept waiting to go back home. I just couldn’t settle in. I frequently asked Jeff and the kids if they felt this way, too. They didn’t.
Cut to the airplane dream I had at the end of 2024. Three and a half years after we moved and on a cross country flight to see family. I don’t sleep so well on planes these days, but I must have been exhausted.
And here is what I dreamed:
I was back in the Los Feliz house but it was present day. In waking life, the people we sold the Los Feliz house to never moved in and never sold it, so it has stood empty for all these years. And in my dream, because I knew it was empty, I had decided to break in and just stay there for awhile. I’d brought a few things of my own to make it homey. I knew how to dodge the security cameras, but also I sort of didn’t think the current owners would mind. I mean the place was empty. They knew I’d lived there before. My dream-self had this elaborate justification for being there, like moving back in was actually a good and helpful thing for everyone.
And then our realtor knocked on the door. (We’re still in the dream.) Our realtor for those transactions in 2021 was also a dear friend. He’s the husband of one of my best mom friends. Our daughters are the same age. In real life, we’ve traveled to Europe and beyond together. He’s also a gentle, thoughtful, soul. He speaks slowly and kindly. He laughs easily. In conversation, his eyes don’t drift away from you to someone more interesting.
In the dream, he approaches me hiding in my old house. I open my mouth to tell him all the reasons I’m there. I think he might understand. He has on a gray suit and he listens while I stammer out my thought process. I try to make it sound like I’m doing the new owners a favor. I try to make him see how much I belong here.
It’s not a mistake that we moved, it’s just that I feel so at home in the old place, I say. We spent more than a decade making it our own and we really made it special. The new place doesn’t really have that same feeling. It’s just a house. It’s not where we raised our babies. It’s not where we found out our loved one had cancer, where we hosted a million dinners, where we shot a tv show, where we had dance parties in the kitchen.
In the dream, my realtor (friend) listened to all the reasons that even though I no longer owned that house, I still sort of owned that house. And then he said,
But you don’t live here anymore.
His voice was kind. His hand reached out and took my arm.
He had been sent, he said, by the new owners. They knew I was there. They were doing me a courtesy by sending him and not calling the police. They just wanted me to go. Because I didn’t live there anymore.
I woke up from the dream in the airplane aisle seat, sweaty. I pulled my eye mask up and my noise cancelling headphones off and took a moment to get my bearings. My family was around me, all on their devices, oblivious to my dazed gaze.
There is a grief in recognizing that you don’t belong in the place where you used to feel most at home. I felt righteous anger that the place had changed, that I was no longer welcome there, that I didn’t feel the same in my new space.
But the message was delivered and received.
I don’t live there anymore. Not in that house, not in my belief systems, not in my career, not in my friend groups, even my place in my family has changed, because life changes. And I’ve been slow to move on.
I believe that my realtor (friend) came to me in the dream because he would tell me what I most needed to hear in a way that I would hear it. Even though this dream was about so much more than physical houses, who better to deliver the blow than someone who deals in change and renewal every day?
To continue the metaphor that is steeped in reality, we’ve lived in our current home since that spring of 2021 and we are still making it ours. It has taken all the years to feel like I belong here, in this new space that I so desperately wanted. Some changes happen overnight, but most are slow.
At least they are for me. A new couch here, a fresh light fixture there. Foreign rooms become your own. It probably feels better with intention, but the change happens even without it. Since waking from that dream with such a clear message, I have purposefully put some old versions of Laura behind me. With love and gratitude and affection, that part of my life is over.
I live here now.
