What To Do When Home Isn’t Home Anymore

I’m sure anyone who has moved away from their homes has experienced the internal conflict of where or what their home is. When we live with our parents, there isn’t much to think about when we are asked “Where is home?” But as we grow older, the meaning of home and the things we associate it with change. The question is, what we do when this happens and how do we adapt to this change?

When I first moved away from home I could not get used to the thought that this weird, foreign place was my home now. What I did not remember or even know, however, was that it will always take time for your mind and heart to decide where home is. It is okay for home to be one place for a while. And when home moves, it is okay then too.

For me, home changed from Malaysia to Australia after only a year and a half of living in the latter. And when it did, I did not understand it for a very long time. The fact that I changed my definition of “home” in my mind did not make any sense. It felt like I was cheating on my first home. Even though this was something I had been wanting the whole year and a half that I was living in Australia, now that I had it, I did not know what to do with it. Because it meant that there wasn’t as much of a longing for home or the comfort I usually found when I landed back home. It left a gaping hole in my chest.

Slowly though, I was able to learn what I associate home with. Personally, I associate home with comfort and safety, and I realized that all of those lie within my partner who lives in Australia. All the aspects I missed, craved and longed for resided in her now. Home wasn’t a place for me after all. It was my parents who I had mistaken to be Malaysia and now it’s my partner who I had mistaken to be Australia.

The only way to get out of the question of “Where is home?” is to find what home means to you, accept it and understand it.