Home Was Always Somewhere Else: A Memoir

What does home mean when every house is temporary-and when the one place meant to offer belonging asks you to hide who you are?

By the time Jonathan Poole was twelve years old, he had already lived in more houses than most people would before graduating high school. As the son of a Baptist pastor, every move came with a familiar explanation: God was calling the family somewhere new.

From small-town Florida to the mountains of Washington State and back again, Jonathan learned how to pack a bedroom, enter an unfamiliar school, and start over before he ever learned how to stay. Each house brought its own collection of memories: bicycles rebuilt in a detached garage, forts hidden in the woods, a bathroom fire no one believed he didn't start, childhood injuries that became family legends, and the quiet sacrifices of a mother determined to make every temporary place feel like home.

But as Jonathan grew older, the hardest thing to carry was not another box.

It was the growing realization that he was gay.

In the church world that had shaped nearly every part of his life, this was not simply an identity-it was something he believed God was supposed to fix. He prayed to change, dated girls, performed the role expected of a pastor's son, and tried to become the person everyone assumed he would be. The more he searched for acceptance, the more he began to understand that belonging built on hiding could never truly feel like home.

Warm, candid, and often laugh-out-loud funny, Home Was Always Somewhere Else is a memoir about growing up in motion, living beneath the expectations of faith and family, and learning that home is not always an address.

Sometimes it is a person.

Sometimes it is the freedom to live honestly.

And sometimes it is the place you spend your whole life trying to find.