What Is Home?
For some people, home is the place they return to each night after they end their day at school or at work. Home is the place that has four walls, a roof, a kitchen, bathroom, and living room where they can sit down and put their meet up in front of the television as they relax from a long, stressful day. For other people, home is cannot be found in a specific physical structure or geographical location, and is, instead, a feeling of comfort and safety that a certain place provides. Like the people who consider home a physical structure, these people know they are home when they can be who they are without being judged by society or by others who might not like how they act or how they look. Of course, how one chooses to define …show more content…
Anyone can decorate their home as they like, and if a person is wild or crazy, he or she will choose to paint the walls pink and green and paste animal figures on the roof. While this may not be for everyone, what matters is that, if pink and green walls passed with animal figures is pleasing to the owner of the home, than this is all that matters. In this sense, then, the home is a continuation of a person’s identity and is one of the few places where a person is able to express him or herself without the subsequent judgment of society. Noting this reality is author Theano S. Terkenli who, in his piece, “Home as a Region,” writes that “the essence of home lies in the recurrent, regular investment of meaning in a context with which people personalize and identity through some measure of control,” (325) thus demonstrating why the home has been elevated to such a high level in American society. The home, to paraphrase Terkenli, is one of the few places that an individual can control, and it is through this control that the home becomes linked to a person’s identity. After all, to refer to the previous example, once the person who decided to splash his or her walls with pink and green paint matures and realizes that this is no longer desirable, the person can repaint and add other decorations so that the home is now different. In other words, the person has added new meaning to the home, making the home different so that it is now reflective of who the person is. In the end, the home is a place that serves as an extension of a person’s identity and, for this reason, has become such an integral part of American
For some people, home is the place they return to each night after they end their day at school or at work. Home is the place that has four walls, a roof, a kitchen, bathroom, and living room where they can sit down and put their meet up in front of the television as they relax from a long, stressful day. For other people, home is cannot be found in a specific physical structure or geographical location, and is, instead, a feeling of comfort and safety that a certain place provides. Like the people who consider home a physical structure, these people know they are home when they can be who they are without being judged by society or by others who might not like how they act or how they look. Of course, how one chooses to define …show more content…
Anyone can decorate their home as they like, and if a person is wild or crazy, he or she will choose to paint the walls pink and green and paste animal figures on the roof. While this may not be for everyone, what matters is that, if pink and green walls passed with animal figures is pleasing to the owner of the home, than this is all that matters. In this sense, then, the home is a continuation of a person’s identity and is one of the few places where a person is able to express him or herself without the subsequent judgment of society. Noting this reality is author Theano S. Terkenli who, in his piece, “Home as a Region,” writes that “the essence of home lies in the recurrent, regular investment of meaning in a context with which people personalize and identity through some measure of control,” (325) thus demonstrating why the home has been elevated to such a high level in American society. The home, to paraphrase Terkenli, is one of the few places that an individual can control, and it is through this control that the home becomes linked to a person’s identity. After all, to refer to the previous example, once the person who decided to splash his or her walls with pink and green paint matures and realizes that this is no longer desirable, the person can repaint and add other decorations so that the home is now different. In other words, the person has added new meaning to the home, making the home different so that it is now reflective of who the person is. In the end, the home is a place that serves as an extension of a person’s identity and, for this reason, has become such an integral part of American