The Homes We Long For: On Loneliness, Soul Fatigue & the People Who Help Us Remember Ourselves

The Ache Beneath the Ordinary

Some conversations don’t give you answers—they just open something ancient in you. They remind you that beneath all the logistics and daily noise, there’s a quiet ache we’ve been carrying for a long time.

I had one of those talks with my best friend recently. It began with parenting, daily responsibilities, and schedules, the ordinary stuff of survival—but ended, as our conversations usually do, somewhere deeper: that terrain between loneliness, soul tiredness, and the endless search for home. Not the kind you can move into, but the kind that lives somewhere beneath the bones.

At one point she said, “We come alone and die alone. But the connections in the middle parts seem important.” And what she said, while simple, was also profound. Because isn’t that what we’re all doing—trying to find meaning in the middle parts? We build and strive and fix and perform, but underneath it all we’re just longing to be seen, to be held in something real, to be met in our wholeness—the kind of wholeness very few are brave enough to witness.

I told her that sometimes it feels like I miss a place I’ve never been. That I’m homesick for a world that doesn’t exist here. It’s not depression—it’s dissonance. A body that remembers something gentler, a self that aches for quiet in a world that worships noise and, honestly, performance. And that is loneliness.

The Shared Language of Loneliness

We went back and forth in text exchanges for a few days, like we have many times in our decades of friendship, about God, belonging, grief, and the strange familiarity of an empty ache for something familiar, yet unnamed we’ve both experienced lifelong. Sometimes it settles in the background for a while, but eventually it returns.

She said there’s a kind of home inside the heaviness. I understood. Sometimes pain feels like the only landscape we know—not because we want to live there, but because it’s where we learned to speak. Like me, she comes from a family of secrecy and “things we don’t talk about.”

When someone else can name that ache without trying to fix it, something in us exhales. There’s holiness in that moment.

Maybe the Ache Is the Path

We wondered aloud if what we’re really missing isn’t a person or a place, but a connection to something larger. Maybe the longing itself is the compass. Maybe the ache isn’t the wound—it’s the doorway.

I don’t think home is something we find once and keep; I think it’s something we keep remembering, one soul-conversation or even one moment of presence at a time.

Finding the Ones Who Speak Your Language

There’s a rare kind of friendship that doesn’t ask you to tidy your sorrow. You don’t have to explain your edges or apologize for being too much. You can sit in silence, ask unanswerable questions, and still feel safe.

That’s the kind of friendship that feels like home. Because sometimes belonging isn’t about being surrounded—it’s simply one person bearing witness and saying, “I see you... me too.”

For Those Still Searching

If you feel far away from yourself lately, you’re not alone. You’re just remembering something sacred that the world forgot.

Keep naming the ache. Keep finding the ones who speak your language. They’re out there—even if you never meet.

Read the originally published article I wrote in Elephant Journal here: The Ache For Home: On Loneliness, Soul Tiredness & the Friendships that Keep us Going.