Writing as a Portable Home

On moving, haunting, and why I write (really)

I moved house a week ago. Sold the one a hundred and sixty three miles away, bought the one near the beach. Three nights into the new house, I woke needing water and walked into a wall.

the new house; my study (currently filled with boxes), July 2026

In the old house the bathroom was an ensuite at the foot of the bed. In the new house, there is no ensuite, and the bathroom is down the hall. My foot connected with a chimney breast, making a bump that woke my husband. Once I explained to him that I’d expected a door there, I stood there for a moment in the dark and thought: I am the ghost here.

We talk about haunted houses as though the haunting comes with the property. Something in the walls, something that predates you, something waiting. But maybe the first haunting of any house is the one you bring with you. For weeks after a move, you are the revenant, drifting through rooms with the muscle memory of somewhere else, reaching for light switches that live on the wrong side of doors, flinching at the boiler’s ignition because you don’t yet recognise its sound. The house is not strange. You are strange in it. You pass through it like something not fully materialised, waiting to become solid.

I have felt unheimlich this first week in the new place, which has been a bit of an unexpected struggle. I always loved the idea of uncanniness, but I was reminded this week of its literal meaning - un-homely. When Freud wrote his famous essay on the uncanny in 1919, he built it on this etymology: the heimlich is the homely, the familiar, the known, and also, in a strange fold of the German, the hidden and the secret. The uncanny is the familiar gone slightly wrong; the face that is almost right but just strange enough to be wrong. The voice that is nearly your mother’s. The house that is, in every functional respect, a home, and isn’t yours.

A new house is the unheimlich in its purest domestic form. Nothing is wrong. I’d been excited for this move, planned the whole house out and bought way too much new stuff ahead of the move. And there was nothing wrong with the house when we moved in. For the first hour or so I was brimming with delight. And, then, slowly, the whole place hummed with wrongness. It hit me that I would never go back to my home, the place I’d left behind. This new place was home and yet it didn’t feel like it.

the new house, July 2026

Home is a property of repetition. It is built out of ten thousand unthinking movements - the hip-movement that closes the drawer, the pressure the back door needs, the number of stairs your feet know without counting. A home is a text your body has memorised. A new house is a manuscript in a hand you can’t yet read.

Medieval scribes believed that copying a text changed the copyist. The labour of transcription was devotional precisely because it was repetitive; the words passed through the hand and into the person.

I think houses work the same way. You don’t live in a house so much as transcribe yourself into it, year by year, until the boundary between you and the building softens. The worn patch of carpet under a desk chair. The pencil marks on a doorframe capturing my kids’ heights ticking upward through the years . The fall of afternoon light in the room where I wrote my books: there aren’t just features of a house. I thikn they’re features of a self, stored externally.

Moving house this time round feels very much like a shedding.

Nobody warns you about the grief of it. Everyone sympathises about the stress - the packing, the cost of it all, the lawyers, oh my god, the lawyers. But we don’t talk enough about leaving a version of yourself behind in a room who isn’t coming with you. The version of me who lived for six years in Inverclyde, the who worked the job I no longer work, who weathered storms in those rooms, who endured the pandemic… She’s still there. In that house. They are painting over her walls in colours she would never have chosen. And perhaps I am entitled to mourn her, even if I left by choice, even if leaving was right, even if this new life is the one I wanted.

This year I have shed more than a house. In April I left a career of over 20 years a few months before I left the place I’d lived it in. I can report from inside the process that the uncanny is not confined to buildings. There is an unheimlich of the self: the strange interval when your old identity no longer fits and the new one hasn’t been transcribed yet. You reach for who you were and find a chimney breast where the doorway used to be.

So what do you do, in the un-homely interval? What holds, when nothing is where your hands expect it to be?

I wrote.

This is what I have been doing since the age of seven, when my home felt dangerous and vicious.

I’ve never felt OK about the word ‘cathartic’ when it comes to writing being good for your brain. It’s also more than a way to process. For me, it’s more like this:

Writing is a portable home. The rituals of it - the room, the coffee, the same document opening and the sigh I feel in my body when I put words into existence - are exactly the kind of bodily repetition that home is made of. When the physical house cannot yet hold you, the practice can. I transcribe myself into the page the way I once transcribed myself into the old house, and the self that felt left behind turns out to have stowed away in the work all along.

the house I left behind in Inverclyde, after a billion years of packing and cleaning, July 2026

The new house is beginning to go quiet around me, which is how I know it’s working. My feet have almost learned the stairs. The bombardment of sensory information that overwhelmed me for the first few days has died done; the strange smell has gone. The transcription has started. It will take years, I guess, and somewhere a hundred and sixty three miles north, the old house is forgetting me at exactly the same rate, my worn patches vanishing under someone else’s furniture, my light becoming their light.

If you are in the un-homely interval yourself - maybe a move, an ending, a self that no longer fits - I can’t tell you it passes quickly, but I can tell you what the scribes knew: the hand that copies is changed by the copying. Find the one repetition you can keep - the notebook, the walk, the same hour each day - and keep it, badly if necessary.

The house will learn you. And in the meantime, the page always knows your name.

---

The Gothic Cabinet is a reader-supported publication. If this found you mid-haunting, I’d love to hear what your portable room is. The comments are open.