Welcome Home: A Guide to Building a Home for Your Soul

by Najwa Zebian

The mistake most of us make is that we build our homes in other people in the hope that they will deem us worthy of being welcomed inside. We feel so abandoned and empty when people leave, because we’ve invested so much of ourselves in them.

That inner voice took me so far past my comfort zone that I surprised myself. I wasn’t used to telling someone how much I wished I could see them. That thought alone—to tell someone I wished I were in their presence—made me blush uncontrollably. I somehow felt ashamed for expressing that…for wanting that…for admitting that.

I said to myself Why are people always so okay with not having me in their lives?

I was hurting more over someone leaving than over who that someone was.

First, emotions are energy in motion, meaning that although they seem so hard and real, they truly are just energy that will flow through and which we can absolutely work through. Second, of course it would be a shock, because you probably would have done things a bit differently. Third, it’s really our ego that gets hurt in this situation. Sometimes we just want to be the one to make those decisions and be the one to cut the ties.

It all hurts the same way. The body keeps score. And when those things continually happen, they create strong neuropathways that cause our belief of not being worthy or not good enough to become more and more ingrained.

Then when we find someone who has experienced similar pain, it hurts even more when they seem to do the same to us.

You can heal a recent wound, but if you haven’t come to terms with your past wounds, you can be sure those wounds will turn into scars that will continue to define you.

When something traumatic happens to us, we look for someone to blame. I couldn’t blame anyone for not giving me what I couldn’t even name. So who did I blame? I blamed myself.

Home is not a physical place. It is the place where your soul feels it belongs, where you can unapologetically be yourself, where you are loved for your authentic self. Home is the place where you don’t have to

work hard just to be loved.

I believe that every moment we live is connected to all the other moments.

It’s like a sweet trick of the universe. Sometimes these are moments of closure. Sometimes they’re moments of new beginnings. Sometimes they’re moments of deeper understanding of oneself. Sometimes they’re just moments of relief. And this moment here was one that, two years later, I could fully understand the meaning of.

We invest in other people, and we evaluate our self-worth based on how much those homes welcome us. But what many don’t realize is that when you build your home in other people, you give them the power to make you homeless. When those people walk away, those homes walk away with them, and all of a sudden, we feel empty because everything that we had within us, we put into them. We trusted someone else with pieces of us.

The emptiness we feel doesn’t mean we have nothing to give, or that we have nothing within us. It’s just that we built our home in the wrong place.

But because every experience in my life up to this point has proved I’m not.”

So let’s change the question from “Why can’t I have that” to “Why don’t I have that?”

goal of constructing the road that leads to your home within is not to avoid the roadblocks in your way. Rather, it is to break them down and use them as road bricks you can interlock to construct the road. That is what makes the road to your home within unique to you.

When you don’t know what home looks like, you take whatever you’re offered.

The third space would be that in-between space where they are able to express the mixture of identities they feel represent them the most.

We each have our own third space. It’s the space in which we feel we are our authentic self. It’s the space that contains all our preferences for how we would like to live our life. It’s the ideal space in which we feel fully and wholly represented. It’s…home.

That is one of the most defeating forms of self-oppression—to know you have power, but not use it. To know you have a voice, but not speak. To know you are in the wrong place, but stay where you are. To know you have so much potential, but not use it.

People accepting what I had to give was all I needed to keep seeking a connection with them. Because that was my audience

These mountains that you are carrying, You were only supposed to climb.

Lacking a foundation for a home within myself led me to attempt to place the elements I had—the knowledge about myself and my worth—inside of someone else. Anyone else. So when they’d reject me, I’d think How could you not see my worth?! When the real question needed to be asked in the mirror. Because if I myself saw my worth, I wouldn’t base my worthiness on someone else’s seeing it.

The only permanent residence you are 100 percent guaranteed to have is within your own home.

Without healing that little girl and understanding why she learned to believe that scraps of love is all she would ever get, there was no way I was going to understand why I chased after scraps of what people had to give.

Before you can genuinely love yourself, you must believe that you are worthy of love.

the work of self-love now will require a process of rediscovery and unlearning of all that came before in your life.

To balance acceptance of yourself as an empath while knowing where to draw the line with your emotional investment in others’ emotions, you must first remind yourself that you are worthy of the love you give to others.

If loving someone is beautiful, how is loving yourself anything less than beautiful?

If wanting to build a life with someone is beautiful, how is building a life with yourself anything less than beautiful?

If wanting to feel at home with someone is beautiful, how is feeling at home with yourself anything less than beautiful?

If you define your worthiness of love by the worthiness that others see, you will always find a flaw within yourself, when the simple truth might be you’re looking for your worth in the wrong place.

Instead of asking yourself Why doesn’t X love me? What do I need to change about myself so that they can love me? What is it about me that’s making them not love me?, understand that just because someone doesn’t love you, it doesn’t mean something is wrong with you.

Embrace your authentic self, and the right people will respect you for being authentic with yourself.

anxious person is the complete opposite; they’re in constant need of validation and come from a place of fear of abandonment.

An avoidant person may come across as secure, but they avoid connection out of fear of abandonment.

anxious-avoidant is a combination of the...

First, find out your attachment style. Second, work toward being as secure as possible.

relationship security. Do this by living as your authentic self, which means you don’t change yourself just for the purpose of being welcomed into someone else’s home. It means you express your needs even if it means that the other person may turn away as a result.

“I accepted so much that I almost believe I deserved to be taken advantage of. I didn’t stand up for myself. I didn’t leave when I knew I had to leave. I kept making excuses for why I couldn’t live without him.

“The female doesn’t want a rich man or a handsome man or even a poet, she wants a man who understands her eyes if she gets sad, and points to his chest and says ‘Here is your home country.’

if I don’t put my own hand over my chest and tell the person in the mirror Here is your home country, no one’s chest will ever make me feel home.

Love doesn’t dismantle your authentic self. Love doesn’t belittle your authentic self. Love doesn’t require you to change your authentic self. Love is not in words. Love is in action.

love is about how you treat the one you love. Sure, we want to believe that love is the passionate, butterfly-inducing feeling that we feel toward someone. The depleting urge to be with them. It can feel that way, but it can’t be that. Love is not self-depleting or tiring. And to love is not about what you feel. It’s what you really do with that feeling.

If you say that you love yourself, what are you doing to show that?

As Leena cradled my face in her little hands, it hit me that the only reason I was constantly feeling unworthy of love was that I was blocking my eyes from seeing love from any source other than the places I was seeking love. I was blocking my soul from accepting love that was given to me without working for it. I was blinding myself.

The focus of your whole being might be on their unwillingness to give you love. If their love is the only source of love you see, you won’t see the love that might be coming to you from family, friends, colleagues, and even potential love interests. Because you’re not looking for that

You might believe you’re not worthy of love, and you’ve supported that belief with evidence from your past, plus evidence from your current situation. If that’s the case, your mind is going to search for every piece of evidence that further proves the story you believe about yourself, or what you make something that happened mean about you.