I did not plan this.
I want to be really clear about that upfront, because when writers talk about recurring themes it can sound very deliberate and literary and sophisticated, like they sat down with a pipe and a leather chair and said, yes, I shall now explore the motif of belonging across multiple narrative arcs. That is not what happened. What happened is that I kept writing stories and kept finishing them and kept stepping back to look at what I had made, and kept finding the same person standing in the middle of every single one of them.
Someone looking for home.
Every time. Without fail. In different bodies, different worlds, different centuries, different circumstances. But always the same ache underneath. Always the same fundamental question driving everything forward: where do I belong, and does anyone there know my name?
It took me a while to admit that this is not a coincidence. It took me even longer to admit why.
The thing about writing is that you cannot really lie in it.
You can lie in a journal. You can lie to your therapist, to your family, to yourself at two in the morning when you are staring at the ceiling running a mental highlight reel of every mistake you ever made. People are remarkably creative at self-deception. But fiction? Fiction is a snitch. You sit down trying to write a cool adventure story about a warrior in a fantasy kingdom and somehow, without making a single conscious decision about it, you have written a character who is desperately, heartbreakingly trying to prove they deserve to take up space in the world.
And you look at that character and you think, hm.
And then you look at the next character and the next story and the pattern just starts grinning at you from the page like it has been waiting patiently for you to catch up.
So. Here I am. Caught up.
What Does Home Even Mean
This is the question I keep asking through fiction because I genuinely do not think there is one clean answer and I find the messiness of it fascinating and also personally necessary to process. Home gets treated in culture like it is this obvious, settled thing. You have one. You grew up there. It smells like a specific thing and there is probably a parent in it who made food and you carry it with you as a baseline of safety forever.
That is the template. And it is a beautiful template. I do not begrudge anyone who has it.
But a lot of people do not have it. A lot of people had the address but not the feeling. A lot of people had the feeling for a while and then it got taken away. A lot of people built something they called home and then watched it burn or collapse or quietly dissolve over years until one day they looked around and the people who made it home were gone and the walls were just walls again.
A lot of people never had the template at all and spent their whole lives pressing their face against the glass trying to figure out how everyone else seemed to understand something they could never quite decode.
Those are my people. That is who I keep writing about. Not because loss is the only interesting story but because the searching is where everything real happens. The searching is where character is forged. The searching is where people make the choices that define them, for better or worse, and where they find out what they are actually made of when the comfortable lies get stripped away.
And here is the thing I keep coming back to, the thing my stories keep trying to say in a hundred different ways: home is not always a place.
Sometimes home is a person. That one person who sees the exact strange shape of you and does not flinch, does not try to sand the edges down, just goes, oh, there you are, I wondered when you’d show up. That is home. That feeling of landing. That full exhale.
Sometimes home is a community. A group of people who have no logical reason to belong together except that they found each other and decided to stay. Found family is real. I believe in it the way I believe in Scripture, with my whole chest, because I have lived it. Those bonds are not lesser because they are chosen. They are not a consolation prize. Sometimes they are the truest thing a person will ever have.
Sometimes home is a feeling that only visits. It shows up in a specific light on a specific afternoon in a city you have never been to before, and for twenty minutes you feel it, and then it leaves, and you spend years chasing it and not quite catching it but knowing it is real because you felt it that one time. That counts too. That absolutely counts.
And sometimes home is something you have to build from nothing with whatever material is available, which is exhausting and imperfect and takes longer than anyone warns you and the finished product has visible seams and that is fine. That is okay. Seams mean it was made by hand.
Found Family Is Not a Trope to Me
I know found family has become a big deal in fiction. I know it is everywhere now and people sometimes roll their eyes at it the way people roll their eyes at anything that becomes beloved and widespread. That is fine. Roll your eyes.
But I want to say something plainly: found family is not a narrative device I reach for because it is popular. It is not a box I tick. It is the structure that makes emotional sense to me because it reflects something I know to be true about how love and belonging actually work in the lives of people who do not get the easy version.
When I write a group of misfit characters who have no reason to trust each other slowly building something that functions like a family, I am writing about a very real human phenomenon. The way people in crisis reach toward each other. The way strangers become chosen. The way the people you did not expect become the people you cannot imagine living without.
That is not sentimental. That is survival strategy dressed up in feelings. And I find it endlessly, endlessly interesting to write because the complications are real. Found families fracture. Chosen bonds get tested in ways biological family bonds sometimes do not because there is no shared history to fall back on, no built-in obligation, no default. You have to keep choosing. Every time. And the stakes of that choosing are enormous.
My characters get that wrong a lot before they get it right. Some of them do not fully get it right within the pages I give them. Because that is honest. That is what it actually looks like.
Memory and the Homes We Carry
One of the weirder things about belonging is how much of it lives in memory rather than in present reality. You can be standing in a place that was once home and feel nothing because the thing that made it home is gone. You can be thousands of kilometres away from somewhere and feel it pull on you like gravity because the memory of being known there is still alive in your body.
Memory is such a strange and unreliable and precious thing. It reconstructs. It shifts. It protects you from some things and ambushes you with others at spectacularly inconvenient moments, like in the grocery store when a smell hits you and suddenly you are nine years old and somewhere completely different and you have to stand there in the cereal aisle breathing through it while someone tries to get past you with their cart.
I think about memory a lot when I write, specifically about how much of a person’s sense of home is built on memories that may not be entirely accurate, that may be curated by the brain for emotional survival, that may be carrying more weight than the original experience could possibly have held. Characters who are searching for home are often, underneath it all, searching for a feeling they remember. Or a feeling they imagined. Or a feeling they were promised and never received.
And sometimes the quest is not to find that original feeling but to grieve that you never had it and build something new in the space the grief leaves behind.
That is a different kind of story. Slower. Quieter. But it matters just as much.
Identity and the Question of Belonging to Yourself
Here is something that took me a long time to understand and that I keep working out through the characters I write: you cannot fully be at home anywhere until you are at least somewhat at home in yourself.
That sounds like a poster you would see in a waiting room. Bear with me.
When you do not know who you are, when you are still assembling the pieces of identity or when pieces have been taken from you or when you have been told for so long that the real you is unacceptable that you have buried it under layers of performance, the search for home gets tangled up with the search for self in ways that make both searches harder. You do not know what you are looking for because you do not know who is doing the looking.
Characters who are searching for home are almost always simultaneously searching for themselves. The external quest and the internal quest are the same quest wearing different clothes. And what I love, what I find genuinely hopeful about this pattern in storytelling, is that the answer to both questions often comes from the same place. From being seen. From being known. From someone or some community saying you are allowed to be exactly this and meaning it.
Identity does not solidify in isolation. It solidifies in relationship. In the friction and warmth of being known by other people and finding out you are still acceptable on the other side of being known. That is why belonging is not just a nice feeling. It is functionally necessary for becoming a whole person. The research backs this up, but honestly, you do not need research. You can feel the truth of it in your gut.
My characters learn this the hard way, usually. Because that is the only interesting way to learn anything in fiction.
Adoption, Loss, and the Stories We Carry About Where We Come From
I am going to be careful here because I want to draw a clear line between my fictional characters and my own life. The people in my stories are not me. Their histories are not my history. The specific events and circumstances I write into their backgrounds are invented, not autobiographical, and I think it is important to say that clearly.
But I also think it is dishonest to pretend that themes like adoption, loss of origin, questions of identity and lineage and belonging, questions of who are my people and where do I come from and what do I do with the parts of myself that have no clear explanation, are just random intellectual interests I stumbled across.
Questions of home and origin and identity are not abstract to me. They are personal in ways that I navigate privately and that inform the emotional texture of what I write without dictating the plot of it. The feeling underneath the story is real even when the story itself is invented. That is, I think, how it is supposed to work. The facts are fiction. The feeling is true.
What I can say, generally and honestly, is that I have spent a significant portion of my life thinking about what it means to belong to people, to places, to a history, to yourself, when the answers are not simple or clean. That thinking does not stay in my head. It goes straight into the work. It drives the questions I ask through my characters and the journeys I put them on and the things I let them find, or not find, at the end of the road.
Loss is woven into a lot of this because you cannot honestly write about home without writing about loss. They are the same conversation. You know what home is because you have lost it, or because you wanted it and did not have it, or because you are terrified of losing what you have built. Loss is not the enemy of home. It is the thing that teaches you what home was worth.
Safety Is the Real Thing
When I dig down underneath all the beautiful language about belonging and identity and found family and memory, when I get to the actual engine of what drives these stories, what I find is something really simple.
Safety.
Not comfort. Not happiness. Not even love, exactly, though love is part of it. Safety. The specific feeling of being in a place or with a person or inside a community where you can stop bracing for impact. Where you do not have to manage yourself carefully or perform a version of yourself that is more palatable. Where you can be tired and uncertain and scared and not perfectly assembled and the people around you will not use that against you.
That is what my characters are looking for underneath all the plot. A place where they can stop holding their breath.
Because here is the thing about people who have not had that, and I write a lot of them, they do not know they are holding their breath until they stop. They have been braced for so long it feels like just the way a body works. And then something happens, some person or place or moment of grace comes along, and they feel the breath go out of them and they realize with absolute shock that they have been tense for years. Possibly their whole life.
That moment of release is the emotional climax of basically every story I have ever written, dressed up in different clothes. A battle won. A truth spoken. An arrival. A recognition. Whatever form it takes in the particular story, underneath it is always the same thing.
Someone getting to exhale.
I do not think I will ever get tired of writing that moment. I do not think I will ever stop needing to.
Why This Matters Outside the Story
I write fiction. I know that. I am not curing anything or solving anything or building shelters. I am making up people and putting them through difficulty and hopefully giving whoever reads it something that resonates.
But I do believe, genuinely and without embarrassment, that stories about searching for home matter in a way that goes beyond entertainment. Because there are a lot of people in the world who are doing exactly that search in real time. People who do not have the easy version of home. People who are rebuilding after loss. People who are discovering that what they thought was home was never safe. People who are autism spectrum or chronically ill or disabled and have spent years being told, subtly or directly, that the ordinary assumption of belonging does not quite extend to them.
People who are grieving. People who are starting over at ages when starting over is not supposed to happen. People who are piecing together chosen family out of whoever showed up and stayed. People who are trying to figure out if they are allowed to need what they need.
Those people deserve stories in which the search is treated seriously. Stories where it is not solved cheaply. Stories where the messy, nonlinear, occasionally infuriating process of finding where you belong is given its full weight.
I want to write those stories. I appear to be constitutionally incapable of writing anything else, which I have made my peace with and which I think is probably exactly right. God built something specific into the way I see the world and the things I care about and the questions I cannot leave alone, and it would be a waste to fight it.
So I keep writing the person standing in the middle of the story, looking around them at an unfamiliar world, asking the question they have always been asking.
Is this where I belong?
And I keep writing them toward an answer. Sometimes it is the answer they expected. Sometimes it is something entirely different and better and stranger than they imagined. Sometimes it is partial, unfinished, still being worked out at the last page.
But I always write them moving toward it. Because I believe they get to find it. I believe we all get to find it.
Jeremiah 29:11 says God has plans for a future and a hope. I take that personally and I think my characters get to take it personally too, even the fictional ones who do not know the verse. The movement toward home is not futile. The search is not pointless. You are not broken for needing to find where you belong.
You are, in fact, doing exactly what humans are made to do.
The searching matters. The finding matters. The building matters. The exhale, when it finally comes, matters.
And I will probably keep writing about it until I run out of words, which based on current evidence is not going to happen any time soon.
Good.
