I know two Marilyns, one on the west and one on the east side of Manhattan. Each of them is extraordinary because they are artists, lovely people and have the most beautiful apartments I’ve ever seen. But their spaces are more than beautiful and artistic: they are their homes, external manifestations of themselves, lived in, cherished and shared with family, friends and acquaintances. They are proud of their respective spaces. By contrast I don’t think I have ever failed to apologize for something about my home: the clutter, disorganization, haphazard furniture, dust...you name it. I have it all, at least some of it, some of the time.
My mother and father did not have extraordinary homes either. Nor did they care. A home was somewhere to live, to place your head down on the pillow at night. The matter of aesthetics was a moot one. Aesthetics were a bourgeois concern, as extravagant as a daily ice cream cone to a starving person.
I write this blog to answer for myself: What makes a home? Although I spent only twelve years, from age six to eighteen, in my large pink room in Rockland County, I still dream of the view from my windows facing east and north. In the summer I rejoiced as I gazed at the sun, a ball of yellow-orange fire, rising over the treetops while my family slumbered; I had a sense that I had an advantage over humans and nature. I was alone in my private space, but not alone because I was nestled within the bosom of my family_ the best of all possible worlds. I had it all: the back and forth, the in and out, like the freedom of a playful puppy loose in a yard with a pet door opening into the kitchen so she can enter and exit at will. In spite of the advantages to which I was privy, I wasn’t fully home in my heart. I was attracted to what I hadn’t had: the aesthetic dimension. I became involved with a brilliant physician who was artistic, possessed a magnificent sense of style and lived in his exquisitely appointed apartment. He opened up the realm that intrigued me. We visited shops and restaurants simply to admire and study the décor. But after a few years I learned that this man could explode into a violent rage. I wasn’t safe in his space.
All I could garner from this shock is that life is multilayered, so complex that few of us reach our full potential without experiencing some trials and tribulations along the way.
In my years as a psychiatrist I have met many people, some of whom have been fortunate in having a place in their childhood that they could call safe—a home. In contrast, some have known abuse that leaves them unable to distinguish between what is safe now in the real world. If they are lucky, they find a very good psychotherapist to lend them a solid anchor (as I did). Then they have to learn to unburden themselves of symptoms, such as eating disorders, depression, anxiety, hallucinations, and/or other counterproductive behaviors. They have to learn to distinguish what is safe in the world for their vulnerable psyches and what is perilous, like a baited hook to a fish swimming free in the vast ocean. And all this is so internal, invisible to the naked eye, that these people suffer in silence in the world and scream noiselessly in the misery of their hearts and souls that few can understand.
After many peregrinations I’ve learned that the real home is invisible and transcends space and time. The real home resides within the psyche that can sort out the real from the imagined attacks in the intra-psychic, interpersonal and international realms.
Dear Reader, I welcome your comments. jsimon145@gmail.com
