I haven’t been feeling like myself lately. But I guess it’s hard to feel like yourself when you don’t even know who you are anymore.

After years of working towards self stability, writing and reflecting, letting people in, and living by my own rules and motivations; I found a home in my mind. Given time, I found peace within this home.

At first it wasn’t very inviting, simply a skeletal structure. Under construction. A wooden base with hope of a beginning. I put up the walls, made of a tough material that allowed me to expect nothing from anybody or any situation. These walls taught me only to expect from myself.

At first they were a clean, off-white, but I painted them however I wanted, and suddenly my home was brimming with color. I filled it with murals of towering cities made solely of sunflowers, of constellations made with various lampshades, of people who rode dragons instead of the metro. In my home I was the artist I was born to be.

My design was not just in the art work, but my furniture and possessions: a couch for comfort with myself, a calendar for attempting to be organized, and so on.

Once my house was full, I felt whole enough to go outside and start gardening. I planted seeds of empathy and kindness in the bare soil, things I wanted to grow in my interactions with other people.

Despite my insomnia, I slept in my house soundly. For a period of time, I felt so secure within the walls that I had built, that I would always leave the door open. And with this opening, people came in. Very few people, but the people that ended up mattering the most.

The house was built for me alone, but I found myself enjoying the company. I felt a deep love for each individual that stayed with me. These became the only people that could hurt me emotionally, and also those who made me the happiest. With their help, the seeds in my garden grew into the brightest yellow daffodils.

One person became so important to me, that with his love and support, my little garden expanded into seemingly endless groves of peaches and mangoes that I didn’t know we had even planted. We roamed these groves all summer. New trees grew on every path we walked, blossoming around us in bold hues of green, pink, and orange. Golden sunshine flooded our days and our hearts. Every moment held a happiness that I didn’t know I was capable of feeling.

As summer ended, the greens of our groves began to fade and fall to the ground in flurries of red and brown. I bent down to pick up a leaf, wondering how summer had gone by so fast. When I looked up, he wasn’t beside me anymore. He had left our twisting paths of sunshine and fruits to go walk the path he was meant to. Like the trees, he had left to grow.

Realizing I was all alone, I assessed for the first time how far from home I had strayed. I squinted through openings in the tree branches, but I could no longer see the walls of the house I had built so carefully.

I spent days looking. Not for my house at first, but just for him, hoping he would somehow just be there again though I knew he wasn’t. Over September, I found pieces scattered among the fall leaves. I found imessages and FaceTimes from another state, I found words and moments that brought me bits of summer again. I collected and clung to them as I continued to aimlessly weave through the trees, now bare of fruit.

Eventually, I stumbled upon my home again. It was empty. There was no sign of my best friends, who had packed up their things and left for California and Georgia while I was gone. I looked out my windows, my eyes. There was no sign of my city or my family. Instead of Seattle, I was overlooking Washington DC, unfamiliar in its array of white marble and red brick.

I backed away, and standing alone, I looked around my now empty house. The mural of the people on the dragon had faded. The couch was covered in a fine layer of dust. What was once safe and familiar territory, now seemed foreign to me. I had spent so much time lost in the groves that I had forgotten to come back and maintain my things. I hadn’t spent enough time at home.

---

In an effort to regain my stability, I tried doing some rebuilding. Slowly, I repainted my walls with new murals. I re-watered my yellow daffodils to remember my values and how I want to treat others. I vacuumed, and often times found a memory in a hidden corner, something someone I love had left behind. I put these memories in a cardboard box, unsure what to do with them.

Sometimes, how alone I am would really set in. I guess it’s called a mental breakdown. On the outside, it is me looking straight up at the ceiling, tears pooling in my eyes. It’s a sad, but calm affair externally.

In the house in my head though, it truly is a breakdown. As in, I break things. Sometimes in frustration, I would punch a hole in one of my walls, or step on the flowers in my garden.

Recently, I stepped back and looked at my house. The walls, though partially repainted, had so many holes punched into them, that the entire structure seemed to be on the brink of collapse. I realized in that moment that there was an inevitability in a total breakdown of the house itself. The holes I had created had taken their toll.

I accepted that no matter how solid the house once was, time and change had weathered it down. I as a person had moved to a new city. I as a person was among new people and experiences. But my mind had remained in a broken house outside a dead grove, clinging onto a familiarity that no longer existed.

Quickly, I rushed inside.

I grabbed the cardboard box of memories. I potted the daffodils I had grown. I stuffed the i-messages and FaceTimes I had found in the grove into my pockets. I took my paints, and I walked out my door; the one that was always open.

It shut behind me with a slam.

I watched my old home crumble. Around me, the groves, the ruins of the structure, and Seattle disappeared.

---

For a few days, it was all gone.

In these days, I faced some very difficult moments. I no longer felt at home in my parent’s house, I did not feel at home in my dorm room, and for the first time, I did not feel at home in my own mind at all.

I rediscovered a deep depression that I have not felt in years. An emptiness that I no longer knew existed inside me consumed me whole. I found myself making decisions that I wouldn’t have never made before, and acting in ways that were completely uncharacteristic. Sometimes, I would lay around, consumed by emotion, and other times, I would lose myself in so many things that there was no time to feel. In this time, I reached out to people that used to keep me company in my old house, desperately seeking advice on the phone from people who no longer fully understood my situation and circumstances. Broken advice from 5000 miles away wasn’t helping me move forward.

I sat in my bed consumed by social media, mindlessly scrolling and double tapping for what turned into hours a day. At the same time, in my head, I frantically shifted through the box of memories I had brought out of the no longer existent house, lost in my own nostalgic sea.

In both cases, I was looking for something.

What? I didn’t know.

Often, I found myself looking through memories of the groves and of him. It was especially difficult to let go of the feeling that came with that time. So fresh, so recent, and so undeniably beautiful. It was impossible not to spend time thinking about the peaches and the mangoes, so I did.

And then one day, I stopped thinking peach. I stopped thinking mango. Surprisingly, I thought tangerine. Not the fruit, but the color.

It was the color of a camping tent.

---

The memory this color brought to me was something older than those of the groves.

When I was little, I would lie in bed, eyes wide, wondering if the dark shadow I saw in the kitchen had followed me upstairs, or if it was lurking in one of the many unknown corners of my house, or even in the basement bathroom with the killer in the PG-13 movie I had just watched, or even worse; with the spiders.

My safe haven, however, was my camping tent.

I felt at ease on our family trips, lying on the dusty air mattress; a good mystery novel in one hand, and a s’more in the other; the flimsy orange walls of the camping tent enclosing around me and the smell  of graham crackers.

It was like there was nothing outside that tangerine tent. No spiders, no bears, no monsters, no darkness. Just a girl and her book.

I remembered how safe I felt in that tent. That flimsy tent. One that could easily be knocked over by the wind or the rain or any outside forces. So how did I feel so safe? It was the same kind of safety I had felt within the house in my mind, and even the groves of peaches and mangoes.

I realized that all these settings; the tent, the house, and the groves, had something in common.

They obstructed my view of what was beyond them.

I realize now that the “home” I am supposed to create for myself is not supposed to stay the same. Much like it is okay to feel alone and displaced out in the real world, its okay to feel this in your head too.

It’s scary, but its okay.

It’s scary but its okay to be lost in your mind with nothing but a cardboard box full of memories, some daffodils, imessages, and paint. The reality is that tangerine tents are flimsy, houses weather and break down over time, and trees go through winters that leave them completely bare.

Everything changes, both externally and in your mind. Clinging on to self created stability may seem to make sense, but it doesn’t, its only a factor of fear.

---

So yeah, I haven’t been feeling like myself lately. My house and our groves are gone, and I don’t feel at home anywhere anymore. I am uncomfortable. I am scared. I have made more mistakes in these past few months than I ever predicted. I have fallen back into habits that I thought I would never repeat.

But I have also grown.

Despite clinging to the past, and being a nostalgic mess. I have grown a lot. Involuntarily, yes, but surely.

I threw the memories from the box up into my mind’s sky as stars. I look at them at the end of the day and feel grateful for the people that have come in and out of my life. I took the old i-messages out of my pockets to make room to carry new things, and have observed saplings of peach and mango trees grow on the ground where I left those texts scattered.  I replanted the daffodils I had grown, alongside other seeds of new values I have found in this new place. I have used the paint I brought to color the world around me with creative inspiration and possibility.

I have stopped passively scrolling through social media and checking my snapchats to feel validated and cared for, and have turned all my phone notifications off, except for phone calls in case my mom reaches out (she’s always worth it). I fill the newfound room in my pockets with my collected experiences and memories of college life. I practice developing into the kind of person I want to be in how I treat the people around me and myself. And today, I truly challenge myself in coming to terms with what is going on through my writing for the first time in about 8 months.

There are still low points of uncertainty, depressive episodes, and hopeless moments involved in my growth and change as a person. There is still fear as I navigate the new landscape both around me and in my head.

But now I understand, that the goal is not to feel safe in a tent, or a home, or a grove. It is to slowly but surely grow comfortable in an open landscape and an open mind.

It is okay to not know who you are. It is okay to let yourself change, because you will anyways.

It is okay to be scared, and lost, and alone.

These are the few negative feelings, among so many new and powerful ones, that come with embracing open-mindedness.