- Okay, I have a fun drinking game if you guys wanna play.

- Whoo!

Every time I say home you have to take a drink because it's in here a lot.

So, all right.

The idea of home.

(audience laughing) The idea of home changed several times for me in 2024.

At the beginning of the year, home was with my ex-boyfriend and about, ooh, halfway through it was begrudgingly back with my parents, and I vowed by the end of the year, it would be with my own place.

And that is where it is now with my roommate.

It's wonderful to have a space that's my own, and we're both getting used to the idea of calling such a new building home.

When my parents not so subtly hint that I don't come home enough, I look around surrounded by my roommates, insurmountable amount of plushies, my legs draped in a cozy blanket with a beverage in my hand.

Is it a hot coffee?

Is it a cold beer?

The time of day is depending, but not really, 'cause free will is a thing, and I'm an adult (audience laughing) and I tell them I already am home.

Home can be many places at once, a palace of solace, a foreign country, a war zone, an empty nest, or all of those things at once.

Home is a place where you lay your head at night, but it's also the place you stop by for Sunday dinner, dodging awkward questions about your life you're not quite satisfied with the answer to yet, or when you pick up the mail that still comes to your ex-boyfriend's apartment, tiptoeing, where you once barged in, avoiding current occupants at all costs.

It's where the toilet overflows in the middle of a party or passive aggression builds based on who did the dishes last.

It's a place of common chaos, for better or worse.

(microphone thumping) It makes me wonder what makes home home.

Seems like it's not so much the place, but the people that occupy it with you.

The familiarity of family makes home a place you can always come back to, where nothing has changed, and new homes can be built with those who are once strangers that become family.

It's different locations with different people.

It's why leaving a man who felt like home for years was so hard and why coming back to my parents who'd ensured this home my whole life was so easy.

It's why departing that safe space, flying the nest once again, felt both exciting and scary, leaving my stomach with flutters of either anticipation or anxiety, not knowing which was which half the time.

Maybe home is simply where your stuff is at.

Whether it's the collective mountain of craft supplies or Christmas decorations from two separate people that has conglomerated into this crazy mountain in your spare room, it could be the old items your dad keeps finding deep in the crevices of your childhood room and brings over intermittently because it's taking up space.

(audience laughing) Or maybe it's just an excuse to pop by and say hi.

Perhaps it's the last trash bag of miscellaneous items your ex found while trying to get rid of every remnants of you.

The unimportant items that held too much weight, a Santa's sack full of shit that's been jammed in the margins for so many years, now just kind of floating in purgatory in the ether between homes, kind of like all of us.

It's a metaphor.

(audience laughing) Sometimes we're displayed proudly on the shelf or stuffed in the back of a closet, and at many points in our life it can feel like we're in the bag awaiting our fate, unsure of where we'll end up.

Maybe that's what home really is, a space where you can land your feet when you're not floating around.

Home isn't linear.

It's not a specific place or even our current time, but wherever, whenever, with whoever, it was where you felt safe for so long.

No matter how many years pass, I'll drive past all these structures that held the people I love and all the stuff I had, the bricks mortared with memories that will come flooding back to me as I fly by, the good, the bad, and the ugly.

But at the end of the drive, home for now is where I park my car, get out and go in.

(Shannon inhales) I can breathe (Shannon exhales) a sigh of relief that I made it here, home.

Our spots change.

Our shit gets moved around.

People ebb and flow into our lives and out.

Change is inevitable.

Movement is necessary.

But maybe home is simply the stillness you can muster amongst the chaos.

Thank you.

(audience cheering)