Home doesn’t always welcome you back the way you expect it to. As strange and beautiful as returning to a place that once held all of you, only to realise it no longer feels the same. The place that once felt like your entire world becomes unfamiliar in the most unexpected ways. It hits you quietly. It might be in the way the house feels smaller than you remember. Other times, it’s in the way people talk about the same things, wear the same opinions, and live the same rhythms.
The conversations loop around memories you no longer live in. It’s not that everything has changed drastically; it’s that you have. You feel like a visitor in a museum of your own past.
This is the emotional dissonance that creeps in when you move out of the house you grew up in or relocate to an entirely different city or country. You carry with you the memory of home as it once was: warm, familiar, and grounding. But home, much like you, doesn’t stay still.
So, what is home, really?
Is it a place, a feeling, or a phase?
Home Beyond Geography
The word “home” often begins as a location on a map. For many of us, it was the house we grew up in, the street where we played, the corner store where we spent our pocket money. It was where our parents or guardians raised us, where traditions were born, and where memories took root. It was the neighbourhood we memorised with our feet, the house with the creaky floorboards and paint-chipped walls, and the familiar smells that lingered long after dinner was over. Back then, home felt permanent, immovable, and certain.
But as we grow, travel, relocate, and evolve, the definition of home begins to stretch. We start to realise that home isn’t just geography. It isn’t bound by borders or reduced to where our birth certificate was signed. It’s something far more fluid and nuanced.
For many, home becomes a feeling; a sense of ease, safety, and being deeply known. It can be found in the way someone says your name, the comfort of a well-worn sweater, or the sound of laughter that feels like a hug. It’s in the people who make you feel seen without having to explain yourself. It can be the smell of freshly cooked jollof rice, the familiar lilt of your mother tongue in a foreign land, or a playlist that instantly transports you to a time when everything made sense.
For others, home evolves into a phase, a chapter in the ever-unfolding story of selfhood. It moves with you, adjusts itself to your seasons, and sometimes disappears only to return in a new form. Home can be a university dorm where you first learnt independence, the apartment you shared with roommates who became chosen family, or even a city where you felt invisible but finally learnt how to belong to yourself.
With time, we begin to understand that the place we were raised, while sacred, familiar, and formative, doesn’t always remain our home. It becomes a part of our origin story, a foundation we carry with us, but not necessarily the place we return to. For some, it remains home because they never left or never needed to. But for others, it becomes something distant, a photograph of who they used to be. It becomes the backdrop of a life they’ve evolved beyond.
Home, then, is no longer a fixed destination but a feeling we chase, a comfort we recreate, and a truth we redefine at each stage of life. It’s an anchor that shifts but never entirely vanishes. And in a world where movement, migration, and reinvention are constant, home becomes less about where you are and more about who you are becoming.
This shift in understanding is profound. It allows us to find home in unfamiliar places, to feel rooted in experiences rather than structures, and to carry the essence of belonging with us, no matter where we go.
Outgrowing Your Roots:
There comes a point in your growth when what once grounded you begins to feel limiting. The town that shaped you starts to feel too small. The values that once felt like the truth begin to feel like one version of many possible truths.
This shift doesn’t always happen overnight. Sometimes it creeps in when you notice your perspectives clashing with those around you. Maybe you believe in a more progressive view of the world while your hometown clings tightly to tradition. Maybe you value emotional vulnerability, but those around you still uphold stoic strength. Maybe you’ve found freedom in a career path that no one in your old life can fully understand.
The tension here is layered. In these moments, you might feel pride in your growth. You might even feel a sense of liberation. You feel different, perhaps even better, more aware, and more open. But often, that pride is quickly accompanied by guilt. Guilt that you sound different. Guilt that you think differently. Guilt that you feel like a stranger in the place that once made you.
You may ask yourself uncomfortable questions: Am I being arrogant? Am I judging my past? Am I abandoning my roots? Am I betraying those who stayed? This inner conflict is real and valid. Growth often carries the bittersweet weight of gratitude and grief. You can be thankful for where you came from and still acknowledge that it no longer fits the person you’re becoming. You can honour your roots without being confined by them.
There is power in holding both truths. You don’t have to disown your past to claim your future. Outgrowing your roots doesn’t mean disrespecting them, it means recognising that they were the foundation, not the finish line. It means acknowledging that while your roots gave you the ground to grow, your branches must now stretch toward a different sky.
And yes, there will always be a part of you tethered to where it all began. But you owe it to yourself to keep growing, even if that means your path takes you far from home, or reshapes your idea of what home even means.
The Relocation and Diaspora Angle: In-Between Worlds
Moving out of your parents’ home is a rite of passage. But relocating, especially to a different state, continent, or culture, is a far more complex transformation. The shift isn’t just logistical; it’s deeply emotional, psychological, and spiritual.
Of course, there’s the expected culture shock. New accents, unspoken social codes, unfamiliar food, and the constant pressure to adjust. But then there’s something quieter, something more persistent: a deep, aching kind of longing. Longing for the scent of home-cooked food that can’t be replicated no matter how much seasoning you add.
Longing for the warmth of your mother’s voice echoing through the house at dawn. (I have actually heard my Mom’s voice wake me from sleep while I was thousands of miles away from home. Surreal? Absolutely.) Longing for the effortless conversations in your mother tongue, without having to code-switch or explain every cultural nuance.
After a while in the diaspora, you begin to exist in a state of in-betweenness. I call it the “in-between world.” You’re not quite from here, but you’re no longer entirely from there either. Too foreign for your homeland, too ethnic for your host country. You find yourself curating your identity like a mosaic; a patchwork of borrowed accents, evolving values, hybrid traditions, and shifting allegiances.
You become fluent in dualities. You celebrate Christmas one way and New Year another. You laugh at jokes from two worlds. You swap between currencies and idioms in your head. And still, there are days when you wonder: do I truly belong anywhere?
Perhaps what unsettles you most isn’t the strangeness of the new place, it’s the unexpected strangeness of the place you left behind.
There’s this myth we carry that when we leave home, home remains frozen in time. That the people, the places, the traditions will wait for us, unchanged, like characters in a paused film. But life doesn’t pause just because you’ve left. It continues in big and small ways.
I’ve seen it happen often. People return home after years abroad, eager to reconnect, only to feel like tourists in a world they once owned. That childhood friend you used to spend every Saturday with now feels distant, preoccupied, shaped by new realities you weren’t there to witness. The cousin who once idolised you now has strong opinions and lived experiences that don’t align with yours. Even the streets you knew like the back of your hand may look unfamiliar with new buildings, different energy, or a pace that doesn’t match your current rhythm.
What surprises me most is how shocked people are by this evolution. They speak of home changing as though it was supposed to stay static. But everything changes, even the version of home we cherish in our memories.
We grow, and so does everything and everyone else. The bittersweet truth is that the home you long for may no longer exist in the same way. And that realization can be both heartbreaking and liberating. Heartbreaking because you miss a version of people and places that time has transformed. Liberating because it frees you to accept that home, like identity, is not fixed. It breathes. It adapts. It grows up too.
This is the complexity of the diaspora experience: carrying a love for what was, while learning to live fully in what is and becoming brave enough to build what can be.
Navigating Relationships with People Back Home
One of the most delicate parts of outgrowing your roots is maintaining relationships with people who still live in the version of home you’ve moved beyond. Especially if you come from a culture where community is deeply embedded, the expectation to remain connected can feel both comforting and heavy.
You love your people. You carry their stories, their sacrifices, their laughter. But love doesn’t always mean alignment. As you evolve, you may find that their expectations no longer match your reality. Their advice might not resonate. Their perceptions of you might still be based on who you were a decade ago.
Staying connected, then, becomes a balancing act. It might mean regular phone calls with your parents, even when your day-to-day lives barely overlap. It could mean flying home for weddings or funerals, choosing presence over preaching, love over defensiveness. It might even mean explaining things gently and sometimes not at all.
But it also requires boundaries. Not everyone is entitled to witness your growth, especially if they dismiss or diminish it. You’re allowed to protect your peace, even from familiar voices. You’re allowed to grow in ways that others don’t understand.
You can love people and still hold space for your transformation. You can honour your background without being confined by it. You can belong to your community without fully blending in.
And sometimes, the most loving thing you can do is redefine how connection looks, on your own terms.
In conclusion, as you grow, as you relocate, as you evolve, there is one truth that softens the discomfort: you can create home within yourself.
It might look like your daily rituals; your morning tea, the playlist that grounds you, the candle you light when you need to clear your head. It might be the people you choose to keep close, your soul family, your partner, your people who speak your language even if they’ve never been to your hometown.
Home can be the values you live by; integrity, curiosity, peace, compassion. When your life orbits around these, you build a sanctuary within yourself, no matter where your feet land.
Some days, home is simply your breath. Other days, it’s the smell of your room after a deep clean. Sometimes, it’s a smile from a stranger that reminds you you’re not invisible. Home stops being something you return to and starts being something you carry.
So if this spoke to you, share it with someone who might need this reminder. And if you’ve ever felt caught between where you were and where you’re going, I’d love to hear from you.
What does home feel like to you now?
This BBC article on The Psychology of Home explains, our emotional connection to place evolves with time and context.
Stay frosty.
