What does home mean when everything changes?

There are some sentences that stay with you long after they are spoken.

Before I recorded this week’s Rise + Rebel conversation with Roger Vaughn, he shared one of those sentences with me:

“I’m homesick for a home that doesn’t exist anymore.”

Roger had spent 18 years building a life with his wife. When she passed away, he didn’t simply lose someone he loved. He lost the person, the relationship, and the shared life that had become home.

That realization opened the door to a much deeper question:

What is home when the person, place, or life that once defined it is gone?

Is home a physical place?

Is it the people we love?

Is it a memory we keep trying to return to?

Or is home something we eventually learn to create within ourselves?

This conversation felt personal for me, too.

I was born in Turkmenistan and immigrated to the United States when I was young. I arrived without speaking English and had to learn how to live inside a culture that was very different from the one I knew.

As I grew older, I began deciding which parts of my Turkmen identity I wanted to carry with me and which parts of American culture felt true to the woman I was becoming.

Perhaps that history has always lived somewhere inside me, reminding me that home does not have to be one fixed place.

Home can be where you are.

Home can be the people beside you.

Home can be the relationship you are building with yourself.

And sometimes, home can be a chapter that changes us before asking us to release it.

Roger and I also talked about how much our environments shape what we believe is possible.

When we feel safe, grounded, and supported, we have more room to take risks. We can create, experiment, and imagine a life beyond survival.

We can play a bigger game.

That is one of the reasons I have become so intentional about the spaces I create around myself. I want my home to remind me who I am becoming. I want it to support my confidence, creativity, and willingness to keep stepping beyond what is familiar.

Because reinvention is not always about becoming someone entirely new.

Sometimes it is about returning to yourself while honoring everything you have lived through and everyone you have become along the way.

This is an honest, expansive conversation about what happens when the life you knew no longer exists, and how you begin creating a new one without erasing the love or the person who came before.

I would love to leave you with the question that has stayed with me since our conversation:

What does home mean to you now?

Not what it meant five or ten years ago.

Not what someone else told you it should be.

What feels like home to the person you are today?

With love,

Aya

Founder and Host, Rise + Rebel

Rise into your power. Rebel against anything that no longer defines you. And the plus is the result of everything that becomes possible when you do.