To some people, leaving home is the most bittersweet moment of their lives. It’s a sign of change and growth as one leaves a place that is previously known to them in the form of a safe haven. A place in which they reside and bask in the familiarity and comfort of day to day life. No matter what sort of day has played out, you can always come home. Home isn’t going anywhere... until you are. 

For me, moving to Australia didn’t mean I was leaving home in the conventional way, as I have now “left home” multiple times. The first pivotal city switch happened when my mother and I left the city we lived in for over two decades. After a storm of what was my mother’s divorce, we outgrew the place. After trauma like that we needed new beginnings. I’ve been fortunate enough to live in 7 different cities across the UK. Each city has held a different definition of home that mirrored whatever current life stage I was experiencing at the time. For example, from the home I grew up in to the home I moved into for university, to the home I moved into for my first graduate job and even to the home I moved into with a significant other. For me, moving to Australia meant that I was leaving an entire country which I called home. However, as I got older and the years flew by, I started dissociating with the idea of a home and when you’ve moved around as much as I had... soon nowhere starts to feel like home.

You could even go as far to say that this dissociation might have made leaving the country almost easier. That’s not exactly how life works though. Contained within these walls of different homes, came people who I ended up spending, what feels like, entire lifetimes with. Each of us experiencing life running on different timelines and circumstances. We all still lived complimentary lives to one another which created many places worth calling home. When memories like such flood my mind and life is heavy with nostalgia, leaving becomes much much harder. 

The last few weeks leading up to the big move across the globe, I often got asked about missing home. Each question made me ponder in guilt about how I wasn’t going to miss any home. At the stage of me leaving, I was very much done with many homes in my country. I needed a new sense of direction in life. My comfort zone shrunk to the point that I barely had one foot left within it. I was desperate for change and more than ready to leave. From moving cities many times, I absolutely hated the packing my life up into boxes stage and unpacking into a new place over and over again. It became just like clockwork. However, I hated nothing more than when someone new would ask “where are you from?”. As I didn’t know which home in which city I should have referred to. Every new place I moved to, would initially have a glimmer of hope to it being different and better than the last. Just like every occasion though, that glimmer would defuse and it just became like any other city I’ve lived in before within the UK. I also became fatigued with the never-changing mentalities of some individuals who would question my life, career and city choices all whilst never taking their own mundane lives under a magnifying glass. What I’m trying to say is, it became ineffable how badly I reeked of desperation for a new country. 

The only home I’ve ever come to know in the last few years is the home I see in people who are my dearest. Let me tell you how these people are the parts of what I actually call home. The home within these souls that I actually miss inside the home of my mind and heart. I miss the single mother that I left who would go on her own growth and healing journey. I miss my incredible neighbour from across the road, an elderly man who has more energy to his life than me at 26 years. I miss the friends who welcomed their first baby this year and who will grow up with only a virtual version of me. I miss the friends who gathered to have adult sleepovers with. When life got rough, we would be under one roof for the entirety of a weekend being unapologetically ourselves. Just laughing and escaping reality through movie marathons and junk food. I miss all my friends that finally met the courage that always resided within them in order to move out of their broken homes. Do you see what I mean? I have pieces of ‘home’ within these people. Some are like the roof over my head protecting me from life’s many storms, some are the windows showing me life through different perspectives when all I can see is a negative outlook. Some people are like the front door, no matter how great or saddening of a day you’ve had, they are the first people you want to open up to. Some people are the walls that surround me providing me strength. Then there are some people who are the foundations, such as the bricks, holding you up through thick and thin. 

This entire time I’ve been trying to give you new readers an insight of my life and backstory to provide relevance with all the future travel-focused blog posts. Piece by piece you’ll see exactly how travelling has enabled me to heal many parts of myself. That’s why the big move from the UK to Australia enabled exponential growth for my healing journey. So for me, leaving ‘home’ was easy but leaving what makes my unconventional version of a home very difficult. I would like to depart on a quote from Winnie the Pooh, how ridiculous of me, right? ‘How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard”.