I moved back to London in 2023. Back to the streets I grew up on, the house where my name was stitched into the walls, the city I once so sure was the only place that I could ever belong. And yet, in the quiet, unremarkable months that followed, I discovered something I wasn’t prepared to admit to myself: I don’t belong here anymore.
At first, I tried to rationalise the unease. I blamed it on logistics. I was struggling with my degree, I was working the wrong job, my bedroom was too small. I convinced myself it was the inevitable discomfort of readjustment, the disorientating vertigo of returning to a place that had carried on living in your absence- a place where the crowds never thin, where the noise is a constant and the pace never lets up.
But months blurred into a year, and one year into two, now almost three, and the feeling not only lingered, it calcified. What was once a faint restlessness became a constant ache, an almost physical sensation of misalignment, it is as though I am inhabiting a life that has outgrown me, or I it. The city, with all its towering ambition and dazzling opportunities, also carries a heavy weight- the endless crowds, the suffocating rush hour crush, the ceaseless hum of urgency that leaves little room for breathing. But I guess that’s just London for you, the city that never quite stops, exciting and beautiful but so demanding, so exhausting.
What no one warns you about is the peculiar grief of returning to a place you’re meant to call home, only to feel estranged from it. The streets are familiar, the rooms unchanged, the faces constant, and yet you move through them like a ghost of your former self. There’s a quiet brutality in that dissonance. In walking through landscapes so deeply imprinted on your memory, knowing they no longer recognise you. Or worse, that you no longer recognise yourself within them.
I’m back living with my family again. By every conventional measure, I am so very fortunate and lucky: I have a safe place to sleep, people who care, and I live in a city many would sacrifice everything to reach. And still, I resent it. And there is so much guilt attached to this, knowing you should be so grateful while privately yearning for escape. People romanticise homecomings, but they rarely speak of how it feels when home stops being a sanctuary and instead becomes a cage. London can be that cage- a dazzling metropolis that dazzles and drains in equal measure. The relentless hustle can wear you down until the city’s lights, once so bright and promising, just feel harsh and unforgiving.
And, in life’s favourite brand of cruel timing, just as I’ve begun to realise how strongly I want to leave, I’ve recently found a job I genuinely love. Work that that fills my days with purpose and ignites a passion I thought was long extinguished. It is a rare gift, this feeling of alignment and fulfilment, and I know I am extraordinarily lucky to have found it. It should be enough to tether me to this city, to offset the restlessness gnawing at the edges of my days. But it doesn’t. In fact, it sharpens the contrast. It’s as though I’ve finally had a glimpse of the kind of life I want- one that challenges and excites me- while still being shackled to the one I so desperately want to leave behind. The disparity is agonising.
I don’t have a plan. I don’t know what city I’d rather call home, or what life I’m chasing. I just know it isn’t this one. And perhaps there’s a certain kind of freedom in that. In acknowledging you’ve outgrown the life you once built for yourself without having to immediately replace it with something new. We are so conditioned to crave certainty, to chart out clean trajectories, to pretend we have answers for questions we’ve only just begun to ask. But some seasons of life exist solely to unsettle you, to unearth dormant longings, to remind you that contentment and belonging are not fixed states but restless, shifting things.
There’s a quiet sorrow in staying somewhere you’ve outgrown. In pretending that proximity equals belonging, that familiarity should suffice. But it doesn’t. Not for me. And maybe that makes me ungrateful. Maybe it makes me difficult, impossible to please. Or perhaps it simply makes me human: a person entitled to crave softness and slowness, something unnamed and elsewhere. A life away from the ceaseless thrum of traffic and hurried footsteps, away from a city that never pauses to listen.
I don’t know where I’m going yet. I don’t even know what it is that I really want. But I am beginning to understand that longing is a compass of its own. And sometimes, the bravest thing you can do is admit when you’re no longer at home in your own life.
