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

by Najwa Zebian

It was painful to write, so I stopped writing altogether.

Writing was my revolution against my seventh-grade Arabic language teacher failing me at writing and telling me that I don’t follow the rules.

You don’t have to have your dream figured out before you live it out.

Why would you even want to walk in this garden if you’re going to spend your time trying to mold yourself into someone else’s dream? You’ll end up feeling, a hundred percent of the time, like a failure. And you’ll steer away from this garden because it will make you feel small.

The turning point for me here was this: It could be seen as eight years wasted, or as eight years invested in preparing myself for the best career I could ever have—truly helping people change their lives.

Instead of seeing what you’ve done for a past dream as a waste when you decide to pursue a new dream, look at skills and tools you gained and can now use to propel your current dream.

You Don’t Follow Your Dream—You Live Your Dream

But this is not a call for you to wait around not taking action until you know what home feels like to you. This is a call for you to take the next step you can take. What interests you? What do you feel invested in? What change do you want to make? Figure that out.

As long as you’re in a state of chasing after something, this current moment will feel deficient in some way.

Fear of Failure Only Hinders Your Dream

Failure is the word that stops most of us from taking the first step or the next step toward any of our goals. It manifests itself as fear.

Your Dream Nourishes Your Home

I will end this chapter by reminding you of this: Your dream is made of little revolutions against all you ever thought you had permission to be. Begin the revolution.

Don’t wait until you’re ready. Because you never will be. You have to be willing to make mistakes. To fail. To fall. To break. Because on the other side of that, there is your rise. And there is your dream.

Listening to yourself is an art that takes practice.

But, remember, you are no longer building homes in other people.

In this type of silence, you can finally hear the voices within you—even the ones that express negative emotions. This is key, because once you hear those voices, you’re able to talk back to them. I used to not be able to fall asleep without the TV playing in the background.

If you master the art of intentionally listening to yourself, you automatically master the art of intentional silence with others.

because silence with ourselves requires us to be alone with ourselves. Alone with the voices within us. And we are afraid of that. We are so afraid of being alone because we equate it with loneliness.

I was still homeless. Because I was still not building my own home within me.

The goal is not to always be in silence, but to use silence as a tool to listen to yourself and consequently understand yourself.

It’s the same thing with any voice that originates from within you. If you don’t tune in to it and intentionally try to listen to it, you miss allowing what it’s telling you into your awareness. If you tune in to it, you’re bringing it into your awareness.

The most powerful voice you can hear within yourself is your own voice. The voice that stems from your authentic self.

I was taking an active part in degrading myself.

Affirm: My authentic self is worthy of my own acceptance.

I see you. I accept that I am thinking and feeling you. And I understand that you are coming from my mind. But you are not who I am. You are not welcome as a permanent resident in my home. You are here because my mind is thinking you, because my heart is feeling you, but you are not me. And I choose not to follow you.

Remember, before you decide where you’re headed, you have to figure out where you actually are.

Don’t be hard on yourself because of the pace you’re moving at relative to the pace you believe you should be moving at. Healing is hard. And it takes time. It takes real change.

You were always a masterpiece. The difference now is that your pieces found more beauty in being together than in being scattered.

I already grieved my past self. I honor her. I honor everything she taught me about my present self.

I will not reverse my growth to shrink into a smaller version of myself that will fit into the cocoon that I broke myself to break out of.

day in a state of not being at home with yourself doesn’t mean you’ve lost your home. It just means you have to come back to yourself.

But the search. The search. What was I searching for?

Home is you.

Home is the deep place in the ocean that nothing happening on the surface can affect.

I am the land my home is built on. I am my own home. And home is me.

Welcome home.

May we always be open to these walls breaking and to these bridges being built.

I’m realizing day by day that the way that people see me is out of my control.

But, if it was difficult for me to listen to, how difficult was it for him to go through it and talk about it?