more boxes

anyone who has gone through the process of moving knows the experience. the moving van leaves and everywhere you look there are boxes waiting to be unpacked. and as you set upon the task of finding a place for everything and putting everything in its place, you find yourself feeling as if there are even more boxes than you remember having been packed and loaded on the truck and even start to question if maybe the movers gave you someone else's belongings in addition to your own. this is certainly the experience i'm having now but it's not exactly the experience i'm going to focus on in this entry.

the thought of "more boxes" first came to me before the actual move itself, right after the packers completed their work and had everything i had brought into my last place of residence nicely and neatly put away in moving boxes of various sizes. what i was referring to with that thought was that yet again i found myself in a moving scenario. and the thought brought more than a hint of sadness and weariness.

you see, this most recent move is my fourteenth as an adult, i.e., since graduating from college (if you add the moves of my childhood this would be the twentieth move of my lifetime). some were big moves across many states. many have been smaller moves across the city or town i was living in at the time. and the fact that i can state with some certainty that this is not my last move may also be contributing to the bit of melancholy that i am experiencing about this whole scenario.

i've reflected before in this blog on how unsettling a move can be for me, and i believe i've also shared how all of this movement has left me with this feeling of being without a true place to identify as home. i remember sharing with michael as we were searching for the place that he continues to call home that i was looking for a "homestead" in which we could settle and establish roots. a place we could live out a significant amount of the rest of our lives (at least until retirement). well, that was eleven years and four moves ago, and the hunger for such a place has only grown more acute.

while i'm sure that some of this desire has to do with being ready to not have to go through the motions of packing and unpacking ever again, i'm also highly confident that the more significant element is wanting to have a place where i feel like i belong. and from yesterday's conversation with my new therapist, i see that while the physical relocations have not entirely created this decades long struggle i've had with the feeling of belonging, they certainly have not helped. i'll be honest that i'm not actually sure that finding the place to settle down is the solution to the problem, but i am certainly ready to try and find out.