The Book I Wrote Helped Me Remember

Lisa R. Conner

I thought I wrote Casa Renae.

I thought I was writing a book about stories, rooms, survival, truth, and coming home to yourself.

But I am beginning to understand something deeper.

Casa Renae was writing me.

Not in words.

In memory.

In ache.

In recognition.

In the slow, intuitive turning of a key, I did not know I had been carrying my entire life.

The title knew before I did.

Outgrowing Your Story and Coming Home to Yourself.

I thought I was naming a book.

I was being handed a map.

Nearly seventy moves.
Decades in real estate.
A lifetime of studying houses, thresholds, departures, arrivals, floor plans, listings, staging, and fresh starts.

I thought I was studying houses.

I was studying HOME.

Houses are created.

Homes are remembered.

A house can be listed in the MLS.

Home cannot.

A house can be bought, sold, packed into boxes, lost in divorce, foreclosed on, or burned to the ground.

Home is never on the market.

Home is essence.

It is the place inside us that asks absolutely nothing of us.

No performance.
No proving.
No permission.

And maybe that is why the ache is so profound.

The ache is not proof that we are lost.

The ache is homesickness.

For the self beneath the stories.

For the truth beneath the roles.

For the quiet knowing underneath everything we built to survive.

I thought I was writing a book.

But Casa Renae was helping me remember the home I had never actually lost.

And maybe that is the invitation.

Not to become someone new.

Not to search the whole world for what has been within you all along.

But to follow the ache.

Because the ache is homesickness.

And the ache is the path home.

Living in curiosity,

Lisa

Lisa R. Conner is a writer, coach, REALTOR, and entrepreneur based in Alaska. She is the author of Casa Renae: Outgrowing Your Story & Coming Home to Yourself and writes Fireweed & Flannel as a place for honest reflections on reinvention, courage, identity, grief, real estate, and the wild beauty of becoming.

If you’d like to order Casa Renae, please click here.