28/11/2025
When Home Stops Being a Home
Letter 2 - From the Margins of the City
Dare Truth's Seeker,
There is a particular sorrow that settles in the air, when a young person sits across from you, carrying a plastic bag instead of a childhood, and the echo of a front door slammed behind them.
It is the sorrow of watching the word -home- lose its meaning. 
Once a home was a shelter of love, obligation, and shared fate.
Today in many corners of our cities, a home is merrily a structure of walls and doors, a place to sleep, not a place to belong. Families live under the same roof, as strangers. Parents retreat into exhaustion and despair. Children grow in isolation the walls contained inside screens and silent rooms.
And when the fragile thread snaps, when conflict, poverty, addiction or emotional numbness erupts, the solution is often brutal in its simplicity:
"Get out, sort yourself out" or let the government do that!
The cruelty is not born from hatred. It rises from something colder: EMPTINESS. A generation raised without a moral framework, without emotional inheritance, without the ritual that once stitched families together. When the inner life collapses, love becomes a burden , and responsibility feels like a punishment. 
I witness the consequences every day.
Young women, eighteen or nineteen, shaking with grief, and they realise they have been abandoned not by the world, but by the very people meant to anchor them. Young men who no longer know the names of their siblings, though they live the meter apart. Children of broken bonds, children of houses, not homes. 
This is the quite tragedy of modern individualism: we have learned how to "stand on our own", but forgotten how to stand with one another. Freedom was meant to expand the soul, yet for many, it has emptied it. 
The home stops being a home the moment responsibility becomes optional, affection becomes inconvenient and family becomes a temporary arrangement instead of a lifelong covenant. 
Perhaps the real homelessness begins long before someone reach of the streets. Perhaps it begins the moment a child realises that the walls around them cannot hold them, protect them, and love them...
But acknowledging this truth is the first step.
Healing begins with naming the wound.
Until the next letter - from another margin, another night.
With clarity,
Sha
(Photo - Madrid/ Spain Feb 2025)
