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

by Najwa Zebian

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.

The biggest mistake we make is that we build our homes in other people. We build those homes and we decorate them with the love and care and respect that makes us feel safe at the end of the day. 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.

Your current feeling about yourself and your worthiness cannot be dependent on the possibility or probability of something happening.

The current culture would have you believe that accepting yourself as you are means not caring about what people think of you. And don’t get me wrong—part of self-acceptance is not caring about what the world thinks. But do you see where the flaw in that definition is? It puts the focus on the world—not on you. How could that be self-acceptance? What our culture calls self-acceptance should instead be called indifference to what others think. Self-acceptance is accepting your self. Not caring what the world thinks of this self of yours is a by-product of self-acceptance, not the other way around. As long as your decisions stem from your need, or want, to stand out in the world, you cannot reach self-acceptance. Your decisions must instead stem from your need, and want, to be yourself. To let your inner self shine through. First your light will shine on your own life, and then on the world.

Before you accept yourself, you must know yourself. To know yourself, you must be aware of yourself.

Reflecting the world around you keeps you in conflict with yourself. Instead, you need to be your authentic self, and the world around you will change accordingly.

If there is anything I want you to take away from these pages, it’s this: The feeling of home is the feeling of I’m together with myself. This togetherness includes all the elements of your being. In order for you to achieve this togetherness, the foundation of your home is the most important part, because it necessitates your self-acceptance and self-awareness. If there is no foundation, you can have all the elements needed for your home, but the lack of a foundation jeopardizes the control that you have over these elements. Without a foundation, your elements will sit on foundations outside of you: a person, a job, a degree, a title, a stage in life, and so on. Your home is a safe and stable place. In a state of homelessness, chaos and confusion will thrive. You’ll look to others for stability, putting yourself at risk of defining yourself and directing the sails of your life according to foundations external to you. There is no more of that. Now you have a foundation built for your authentic self within you. Your stability is within you. Now it’s time to place the elements on top. Are you ready?

When you believe you are worthy of love, you will start seeing love around you. You will also start to define yourself by the love you have within you, not the love you receive from external sources. You will start to build boundaries around the love you have within you to protect it as a valuable asset reserved for yourself and those you welcome into your home. Self-love means you do not beg anyone to welcome you into their home or to validate your love by giving it a place to stay.

Self-love is loving yourself exactly as you’d love the person you love the most. And that love actually feels like love and looks like meeting your own needs.

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. It could just mean this person isn’t right for you. So quit trying to change yourself in hopes that person will love you. Embrace your authentic self, and the right people will respect you for being authentic with yourself.

Sometimes forgiving yourself takes the form of you telling the story as you experienced it, not as someone else wrote it. Instead of “He first did this, then this, then that,” you are saying “I did, I felt, I . . .” And this is not to lay blame on you . . . it’s to make you the narrator of your own story.

It’s hard for us to define ourselves without our pain, because all of a sudden we have to face the truth about ourselves. Most of us don’t even know who we are. I’m not saying this to sound like I’m shaming you or myself for holding on to the pain. I’m simply trying to shed light on the reasons it’s easier for us to live in pain than it is for us to live without pain. It’s not because we want to live in pain. It’s because living in pain is a lot less painful than living unanchored to something. To someone. To a memory. To a moment. When we don’t know who we are, we feel like we have no purpose. So we walk and live aimlessly, not feeling any sense of drive. Many of us would rather not live in that state of not knowing, so we go to what we know. Pain. We tell ourselves that carrying the identity of someone who experienced something is better than not carrying an identity at all. Letting go is seeing and accepting yourself as you are, without the pain. Without the story. Without the labels. Without the identity you’ve created for yourself based on the pain or the story. Accepting that you are not what happened to you. And that you are not the result of it. Instead, you are who you are, with or without it. Does that mean that what happened to you wasn’t bad enough? Or that it wasn’t significant? Absolutely not.

Sometimes people walk in wearing a cloak of compassion that you soon realize is not real. When this happens, remember you’re the owner of your home. You may escort them out the door just as you escorted them in.

When you focus the boundary on yourself, your focus shifts from feeling hurt because someone is not giving you the value you think you deserve to seeing that this person is violating the standard of respect you set for yourself. And you say My worth is not dependent on someone respecting how I want to be treated.

Part of respecting others is respecting their boundaries. Part of respecting yourself is building your own boundaries.

I know you believe that you are coming from a place of love and protection, but you have to respect my autonomy. Loving me should not be conditional on whether I do or say what you approve of. You might think shaming me will protect me, but it will only hold me back from being my own person. I am human. I will make mistakes. It doesn’t make me a bad . . . [daughter, son, . . .].

You are not a bad person for not accepting someone taking advantage of you or your time. You must stand up for yourself.

welcoming people into your life. When you don’t know what you’re open to receiving, you will take in anything and later realize that it’s too little or simply not what you want. But when you take the time to know what you want, you will be open and ready to receive it.