do I miss home?

thoughts on moving abroad, home, and belonging.

“You are so brave,” I am often told when sharing with someone I moved here from Australia. It’s strange to hear because I don’t feel very brave. There are many other areas of life I feel terrified of (dating, taxes, cleaning under the fridge). In fact, moving across the world felt like the most normal and natural thing in the world. When someone asks if I miss home, I am blunt with the truth: no, I don’t.

My entire life I have been primed to move abroad, born to an expat mother who did the same around my age and a father who worked for Qantas. We traveled a lot when I was young. Flying standby meant it was common to book a spontaneous trip the following week if seats were available, picking a destination at random with the exhilaration of not knowing the specific details. The benefits of flying standby means you can do this — buy tickets for less than half price and book them on a whim (in an alternative reality, I decided to become a flight attendant to keep these privileges). The downside — or exciting part, depending how you frame it — was there was always a chance you would not get on the plane if it were fully booked. You needed to be flexible. Sometimes you got stuck in a place for an extra day or two, sometimes up to a week.

From a very young age, there was always an inexplicable seed of knowing I was going to live overseas. It was never a matter of “if”; it was a matter of when. I took baby steps to reach this point. Since I was eighteen, I travelled at least once a year for a few weeks, then months. At first I traveled with friends, and then eventually, I went on my own. I got used to navigating foreign airports and arriving in countries where I knew no one. I was constantly leaving and returning to Sydney like a boomerang, yet always plotting my next escape.

I read a quote once that said there’s two types of people in this world: those that leave their hometown and those who choose to stay. That one simple decision can change the entire trajectory of your life — the outlook you have as someone who left “home,” whether that’s your city or your country, is something that can’t be replicated by anything else.

Home and belonging go hand-in-hand — we tend to feel at home where we belong. The truth is I never felt like I belonged in Australia. I felt like a plant trying to grow in the wrong soil. There was always a sense of uneasiness and an element of dread whenever I had to return back to Sydney. I would feel this heaviness in my chest as soon as I stepped off the plane, this sinking feeling and intuitive knowing that this was not where I was supposed to be. Often, the following weeks I was incredibly depressed as I tried to recalibrate myself back to “normal” life. Each time, however, it became more unbearable to endure this version of “normal.”

(if you know about astrocartography — my only lines that run through Australia are Saturn, Chiron, and Neptune. In Santa Fe I live closest to my Mercury and Jupiter lines.)

There are some very specific things I miss about Australia: the sound of the birds, the taste of the coffee, the dance studio on Enmore Road, the beaches along the South Coast. I miss laughing with my sister until we’re wheezing on the floor. I miss hugging my mum. I miss the sound of my dad turning the kettle on in the morning and being able to ask him to fix practically anything I couldn’t figure out on my own (which is most things, tbh).

But I don’t plan on going home anytime soon. Even these specific cravings for certain people or experiences are always overwhelmed by my gratitude, and resolute knowing, that I am meant to be in the States. Even when it’s tough, there is still not a doubt in my body that I belong here.

One of the major differences I’ve noticed between cultures (and yes, this is a gross overgeneralization based on my own experience) is that Australians are much more conservative, personality-wise. We inherited some of that British “cool” demeanor. Small talk is common, but I always found it incredibly difficult to break out of established cliques — at least in Sydney, your friend group often remained the same from high school or earlier. I was rarely ever approached at a cafe or a bar by someone I didn’t know, which usually, was preferred on my end too. In the States, I have felt a sense of openness, friendliness, and warmth to strangers. Some might describe this as “fake” — but I have felt incredibly welcomed here and often make friends or strike up conversations with people I just met.

There is a saying that Santa Fe will either swallow you in or spit you out. Some people, no matter how hard they try to make things work, seem to meet resistance at every turn. For others, things just fall into place without much effort at all, as if the land wants to keep you here. I feel I have been swallowed in. At some point, I am sure it will spit me out. Or perhaps, the small-town-vibe of this city will eventually begin to feel claustrophobic. But for now, it fits just right.

I guess the irony is — I’ll never quite belong as an expat in a foreign country, but I’ll never quite belong again (if I ever did) in Australia either. You begin to exist in the in-between, a unique blend of both. It is good for me, however, to be reminded that moving abroad is a big deal, to give myself some credit over these last two years by not underestimating what it takes to uproot your entire life at twenty-five. Some might say I pulled a geographic. Though honestly, it kinda worked.