Home

After seven years of wandering around the Southern Hemisphere, my travels have brought me back Stateside.

I'm Home.

I feel like Dorothy in many ways.

It was a tumultuous, surreal, strange, sometimes wonderful, sometimes nightmarish experience in the Land of Oz.

I met a lot of interesting characters. Some were warm, caring and friendly people that will forever be part of my "circle." Some were astoundingly horrible and best forgotten.

However much it feels fantastic to be at home in the fold, there are bits of my roots left in that wide, treacherously enchanting country. Australia has a way of getting under your skin and enticing one to put down roots and stay.

I went there with the intention of making it my home forever. I believed people that I shouldn't have. Their masks were cemented in place, and they fooled a lot of my "circle" people too. It wasn't long after I arrived that the cracks started to show and the crumbling away began.

Reality was mind-numbing.

In trying to make it work, I nearly lost myself. A second time. Two failed marriages has a way at eroding whatever self esteem one has. In the end, it will destroy you if you let it.

When my one-way flight for Los Angeles left Brisbane for good on a sunny September morning in 2013, I gazed out the window. I realized I'd been holding my breath. In fact, I think I'd been holding my breath since I escaped my living conditions in February.

As Virgin Airlines' Boeing 777 cleared the coastline on my right, I pictured my roots, like tentacles, tangled in the land, attached to me and stretching, stretching, stretching--until all I saw was blue-green water under a cloudless cerulean sky--then they snapped. They broke off, doubling back on themselves and fell.

I know there is a long road ahead. A lot of healing is in my future. It's begun, slowly.

It's nice to be in a safe environment to do that. It's refreshing to my soul to have true family and friends who genuinely care about me, surround and soothe with the balm of their love, laughter, respect, kindness, generosity, and time.

I won't sing "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" anymore.

My pot of gold is here. Home. America. The land of the free and the home of the brave.

I am breathing again.

I'm writing again.

I'm smiling and can laugh again.

Most importantly, I'm living again.