Is It Weird to Feel at Home Everywhere and Nowhere at the Same Time?

Someone posted on Instagram asking how people define home.

It was a general question. Posted into the void. Probably expecting answers like where my family is or the place that feels like you when you walk through the door. Something warm and portable, and not the kind of question that requires a paragraph to answer.

And then I showed up in the comments.

I wrote an entire paragraph. Several, actually. I am not sure that was what @quierounpanicoconcheese had in mind when she posted. But when someone accidentally asks the right question you have been carrying around for years, the answer comes out whether you planned it or not.

Here is what I wrote:

“Hard to explain. I was born in Brazil, lived in Australia for almost ten years, lived in Ireland for two, Portugal for almost three years and now in Switzerland for three years. When I am back in Brazil I feel too foreign, but when I am not there I miss the food, the music, the culture and the people. I miss Ireland. It was truly one of the most beautiful places I lived. I miss Australia because I have all of my best friends there. I miss the food, the people and the culture too. I absolutely love Portugal and have never felt so welcomed in any other country. I miss Japan, but I never lived there. I miss Denmark and its beautiful culture, but I never lived there either. I miss the Netherlands, the people and yes, the peanut butter that is just chef’s kiss. I miss the US because, I mean, have you been to New York City? Don’t even get me started on Chicago. I love that place. But again, never lived there. So home is everywhere and nowhere.”

The person who posted probably wanted something shorter.

But here is the thing. The question is genuinely hard when you have lived enough places that the concept of home has had to expand to accommodate all of them. When you go back to the place you were born and feel like a foreigner. When you miss a country you have never even lived in. When the answer to where is home? is my husband, my daughter and the dog, and we are all right here, and somehow that is both completely true and not quite the whole story.

My family is with me. That part is simple. We go together. We work it out together. We carry a small version of home between us wherever we land.

But the rest of home is distributed across five countries, like Voldemort’s horcruxes. It is in the friends I left in Brisbane who know me better than almost anyone, in the soft winter afternoons in Ireland when the daylight disappears earlier than feels possible, in the way Portugal made me feel welcome in a way I had not felt anywhere before or since, and in the peanut butter in the Netherlands, which is a sentence I never expected to write but here we are.

This post would’ve been way shorter if I’d just said, 'Home is where the snow is.' Gotta love the cold! 🥶

Identity migration does this. When you move enough times, home stops being a place and starts becoming a collection. A set of specific things from specific places that together make up something you carry rather than something you return to.

Home is no longer a single place I can point to on a map. It is made up of all of them, and the map keeps growing.

Is that weird? Maybe. But I think it is also the most honest version of what home becomes when you have lived this life long enough. It is not a location. It is an accumulation. And the accumulation grows every time you leave somewhere that leaves something in you.

My family and I have a bit of home everywhere. We are still working out what to do with that. I suspect we always will be.

Jessica Gabrielzyk