There's an expectation in our society that you'll grow up, buy a house, get a mortgage, and jump through all the financial hoops that home ownership entails, explains Patrick Devine-Wright, a professor in human geography at the University of Exeter. In the modern Western world, perceptions of home are consistently colored by factors of economy and choice. "They come from inside - from inside your brain, or inside your soul or inside your personality." But for many South Asian communities, a home isn't just where you are, it's who you are. Most Westerners believe that "your psychology, and your consciousness and your subjectivity don't really depend on the place where you live," Sax says. What I learned, in talking with Sax, is that while in the West we may feel sentimental or nostalgic attachment to the places we've lived, in the end we see them as separate from our inner selves. This is the conception of home held by many South Asians and it fascinated me so much that I set out to write this story. Sax, that I began to question that idea: "People and the places where they reside are engaged in a continuing set of exchanges they have determinate, mutual effects upon each other because they are part of a single, interactive system." It wasn't until I stumbled across the following notion, mentioned in passing in a book about a Hindu pilgrimage by William S. We may use our homes to help distinguish ourselves, but the dominant Western viewpoint is that regardless of location, the individual remains unchanged.
#Grow home image effects full
I know full well that living in Paris for three months doesn't make me a Parisian, but that doesn't mean there's not an Eiffel Tower on my shower curtain anyway. "You might choose to identify as a person who used to live somewhere else, because it makes you distinctive," Clayton says. But while it's human nature to want to have a place to belong, we also want to be special, and defining yourself as someone who once lived somewhere more interesting than the suburbs of Michigan is one way to do that. So how does that affect our conception of ourselves? When you visit a place you used to live, these cues can cause you to revert back to the person you were when you lived there.įor better or worse, the place where we grew up usually retains an iconic status, Clayton says. It's hardly rare, though, in our mobile modern society, to accumulate several different homes over the course of a lifetime. These large patches of vegetation serve little real purpose, but they are part of a public face people put on, displaying their home as an extension of themselves. Susan Clayton, an environmental psychologist at the College of Wooster, says that for many people, their home is part of their self-definition, which is why we do things like decorate our houses and take care of our lawns.
When laid out all together, the theme to my décor becomes painfully obvious, but why it was more important to me to display the places I've lived rather than pictures of friends, or favorite music or books, all of which are also meaningful, I couldn't initially say. I considered each of those places my home at one time or another, whether it was for months or years.
My roommate and I have an entire wall in our kitchen plastered with maps of places we've been, and twin Ferris wheels, one at Navy Pier, one at Place de la Concorde, are stacked on top of one another in my living room. Typographic posters of Michigan and Chicago hang above my bed, a photo of taxis zooming around Manhattan sits atop my dresser and a postcard of my hometown's famous water tower is taped to my door. There's a triptych of sunsets next to my bedroom door, dusk forever falling over the small Michigan town where I grew up, the beach next to my college dorm and Place de la Concorde in Paris, where I spent a cliché but nonetheless happy semester.