The Places You've Left That Never Left You

Some places don't release you cleanly. They just become part of how you move.

As a long-term expat or immigrant living abroad, you don’t think about “there” much anymore.

Then someone mentions the city. Or a song comes on. Or the light changes in a specific way in late October — and suddenly your “there” arrives here.

It’s not quite a memory. It’s more like… a soft presence.

The leaving is what gets talked about for long-term expats. The arrival, the adjustment, the slow work of belonging somewhere new.

But the way a place you left continues to occupy you — that gets less airtime.

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Not every home is a place you’ve just passed through.

There are the streets that shaped something. Where you became a version of yourself you’re still partly carrying. Where something solidified. Quietly. Seeping into your bones and into your way of moving through the world.

Those places don’t release you cleanly.

In fact, sometimes, they never let you go.

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Photo by Tobias Bjørkli

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There’s no loss to name. You chose to leave. That place — your “there” — still exists. You could return — and some people do, and find that returning is its own kind of grief, which is a different story altogether.

Because when you return…

The version of the place you lived in doesn’t quite exist anymore. The version of you who lived “there” doesn’t quite exist anymore. The intersection of both — that place, that you, at that time — that’s gone.

You can’t go back to it. You can only carry it.

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5, 10, 15 years later: your “there” is still within you.

In a threshold for cold that doesn’t match your current climate. In a way of moving through a neighborhood. In some residual sense of what silence is supposed to sound like.

It’s why answering where are you from feels like a longer story than it should be.

The places that have shaped you, stay. Though you no longer inhabit them, they become part of you in your new “here”.

That’s not a problem to fix. It’s what it is to have lived more than one life.

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If you’re reading this and recognizing a truth you’ve carried — as you move through your “here” and “there” everywhere all at once — you’re not imagining it.

And if this essay named something uncomfortably accurate, you don’t have to make sense of it alone:

I hold a small number of Expat Orientation Conversations each month — 60‑minute, one‑to‑one, non‑clinical sessions for sense‑making and orientation, not therapy or coaching.

Together we look at how long‑term life abroad may be shaping your inner experience, find language for what has been hard to name, and gently sort what’s contextual from what’s personal before you decide what, if anything, you want to do next.

Let’s keep walking the edges together.

Onward,
Kay✨

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Who’s behind Edgewalkers Collective?

I’m Kay — Filipina American TCK (Third Culture Kid), 17 years in Spain, and a counsellor-in-training (CPCAB, UK). I spent over a decade working in inclusion and cross-cultural strategy, helping organizations bridge cultures. Now I’m training to offer something different: recognition-based support for expats and global citizens who are done being told they should feel lucky to be here.

• If you’d like a sense of what working together could look like, you can read more on the Work With Me page.

• If you already know you want to sit with this more regularly, you can upgrade to paid for monthly guided audios and quarterly pattern reports from my ongoing research interviews.

• If this work is useful and you’d like to support it another way, you can buy me a coffee.

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