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

by Najwa Zebian

The one in charge of letting go of the pain inflicted on you is you. Not anyone else.

You are not the reason an arrow was aimed at you. You are not the reason an arrow brought you to your knees. But you are the only reason that you chose to get up off your knees with blood on your hands and tears in your eyes. It is the resilience in your spine, in your veins, that takes the credit, not the misery that gushed from their hearts to release an arrow at you.

Truth be told, I had no idea what I wanted. I had no idea who I was. I had absolutely no idea.

I always felt malnourished.

Forgiving myself meant that I understood myself.

I did not heal from my trauma by understanding what happened at a logical, conscious level. My trauma still shows up in my life. My healing means that I am aware of it. Making sense of trauma does not mean you won’t be triggered to go back to it. Trauma feels like an invisible organ inside of me separate from my heart that, in certain situations, and simultaneously with my heart, beats pain into my veins. Part of self-forgiveness and healing is accepting the pain when it comes and not judging myself.

But do you see what direction you need to take to reach that person? It’s in the past. It’s behind you. So if that’s what you’re trying to do, I’m going to ask you kindly to stop.

practicing self-compassion is not selfish.

The friends who fell out of my life were the ones who listened to my pain and agony with judgment rather than empathy, with a desire to feel better about themselves by belittling me. Those are people I don’t speak to anymore.

If by expressing your boundary to someone, you are expecting that their behavior will change, that is not a boundary. A boundary is free of the expectation that it will change a person’s behavior.

Emotions are visitors in your home.

I realized I felt bad because I wasn’t willing to receive someone else’s expression of love for me. Because I didn’t truly believe that I deserved it. I blinded myself to my worthiness of what others had to offer me because of what I believed about myself.

Sometimes, people just want to give us love, time, attention, and affection because they genuinely see us for who we are. And they’re willing to give all that to us compassionately. And it’s our own rejection of ourselves and what we deserve that makes us believe that what they’re giving us is too much.

The next time someone offers you something and your first instinct is to say no, reflect on whether you’re saying no because you genuinely don’t want what they’re offering or because you don’t believe you deserve what they’re offering you.

You enter this room when you can’t make sense of what you’re going through, when you’re feeling confused.

I am so afraid to break in front of anyone because part of me is afraid that they will not see that I’m heartbroken, because of the world, not because of this.

was hiding years of searching for home. I was hiding how out of place I felt.

I was hiding how humiliated and emotionally debilitated I was to have experienced sexual harassment and power abuse.

But remember that guilt is a normal emotion to experience when you’re going against what you’ve believed for so long.

Unveiling your authentic self may take a while. It may feel untrue to yourself to be going against how you’ve always been. This doesn’t mean you’re on the wrong path. It just means you are changing. Just like unveiling, clearing a mirror that hasn’t been cleared in ages may take a while. And the image you see in it may take a while to get used to. You might feel foreign to yourself . . . foreign to the self you’ve been for so long. But wasn’t that the self that was constantly building homes in others, waiting to be welcomed? Your unveiled self is the ultimate at-home self.

Don’t let anyone define liberation for you.

Once you are able to label your experience, you have already experienced clarity.

You are not confused. You are experiencing a confusing situation. Separate the confusing situation from who you are.

When you are feeling confusion, your soul is searching for clarity. And clarity cannot be seen when it’s clouded by your wishes or your delusions about what the truth is.

You need to stop seeing others as you wanted them to be, or as you thought they were. You need to see them as they actually are.

But as long as you are moving toward yourself, you will reach home. You will reach home.

Stop Looking for a Speck of Dust in the Ocean

What you’re looking for is closure. And your hope is that once you understand why they did what they did, you’ll be able to move on.

But . . . spending all that time going over every single detail and hoping that, somehow, within the folds of those details you’re going to find your answer is like looking for a speck of dust in an ocean. You’re never going to find it.

Let them keep what they took from you.

Just let them take it. Even if what you got in return was pain, poison, rude words, and arrows aimed at your heart, self-esteem, and self-worth. Let them take it.

So it’s okay for it to hurt. Let it. Sit with the pain.

You don’t have to be okay with it to accept it.

Understand that not allowing yourself to be angry doesn’t make you a good or a calm person.

Your home belongs here and now, with you. It is alive with you. It changes with you. It grows with you.

“Trauma is not what happened. It’s how you respond to what happened.”

Identify your distractions. Make a list. Remove them. Be alone with your thoughts, and be clear on what is best for you to be doing in this moment.

I was willing to endure abuse to receive a tiny bit of love.

Something needed to really change.

As I told you in the Clarity room, there is not one defining moment that will push you to build a home for yourself and never look back. There is a series of moments.

And whatever that looks like to anyone outside of me is not up to me.

healing happens on the road to healing.

And because of not knowing where to start, it was very tempting for me to not start at all.

I felt fooled.

I felt like I was saying farewell to the happy ending I’d so badly wanted before it even had a beginning.

I had to learn, the hard way, that when you keep trying to change the ending, it will only end worse than the way it ended the first time.

Had those who abandoned me allowed me to rent a space within them, I would have never found the need to build my own home.

I can’t see myself without someone seeing me.

All of the places that let you go are leading you to your home.

So until you see yourself as worthy, someone else seeing you as worthy won’t make you feel worthy.