When Going Home Feels Like Starting Over

On the grief of returning somewhere familiar when you're no longer the person who left.

You’re at the supermarket in your hometown. It’s the one you went to a hundred times before you moved abroad.

You know exactly where the fresh produce is. You know the shape and width of the aisles, as you wander up and down. The fluorescent lights overhead buzz at a familiar frequency. Everything is frozen in time, exactly the way you remember it.

Yet for all its familiarity… you’re not-quite-settled.

You’re moving through the space correctly, but you feel slightly out of step. As if you were observing yourself moving up and down the aisles of your memory while living the experience in the present. As if you were watching yourself performing a routine you used to do without thinking.

The place recognizes you. You don’t quite recognize yourself within it.

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When the place is the same, but you aren’t

This is what return disorientation feels like. Achingly familiar to those of us who’ve lived abroad, or outside of our “home” context, for many years.

It’s not the disorientation that most people write about. It’s not the kind where everything around you has changed and you’re struggling to keep up, navigating a cultural rulebook you’re unfamiliar with — you know how to navigate that. This is the other kind: the disorientation where everything stayed the same, and you didn’t.

A return “home” leads to a kind of disorientation that most people don’t write about. The kind where everything stayed the same, and you didn’t.

The old rulebook, and the new one

You’ve been away long enough that adaptation became invisible. You stopped noticing it was happening because it had already finished. It became your baseline.

And now you’re back. The place you remember is exactly as advertised.

The difficulty, if you can call it that, is that you aren’t.

Part of what makes the supermarket aisle so disorienting is that, on paper, it should be “easy” for you to navigate.

You still know how things work here. You know the social shortcuts at checkout. You know what counts as “polite”, how long “small talk” supposed to last, which topics are “appropriate” and which ones are “off limits”. Because the old rulebook is still in your body. It was embedded in your original hardware before you moved away.

But somewhere between the time you left and the time you returned, another rulebook was added.

Years abroad taught you a different way of moving through the world. Different pauses in conversation. Different ideas of enough. Different assumptions about work, care, time, rest, safety, connection. You learned these codes from scratch, through (often painful) trial and error, until they stopped feeling foreign and started feeling like you. That adaptation finished a while ago. There wasn’t a “level unlocked” screen to mark the occasion, but you got there.

So when you return, the disorientation isn’t because you don’t know how to behave. It’s that everyone assumes you’re still operating with an earlier version of yourself, while you’re trying to reconcile who you were with who you are now.

Your family and friends greet the person who left. The one who hadn’t yet learned how to navigate another healthcare system, advocate for themselves at immigration, or play by another set of unspoken norms and nuances. The one whose thresholds and tolerances were keyed to this place.

The people you know respond to that version of you as if it’s still here. And you catch yourself playing along, because for a while, it’s easier to perform familiarity than to explain how much has shifted.

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Photo by Mathias Reding

Since the start of this year, I’ve been speaking to long-term expats and global citizens as part of my research into migratory grief. One of the people I spoke to recently put it like this:

“A return is traumatic in its own way, like starting from scratch in a place you no longer belong. Because you’re not the same person who left.”

The invisible rulebook of the life you left behind hasn’t changed.

But you have.

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Grief for the version of you that never came back

So what do you do with that?

On the outside, nothing dramatic changes. You’ll still make the same trip home from the supermarket. You’ll still sleep in the room you once left behind, or in a guest room that holds the echos of it. You’ll still show up to dinners, laugh at jokes at the right time, play your role. On the inside, there’s a slow but steadily growing awareness that the version of you that this place remembers doesn’t quite exist anymore.

There’s a grief there that most returners can’t name.

Not just for the country or place you left behind, but for the intersection that no longer exists: that place, that you, at that particular time of your life. You can come back to the geography. You can’t come back to that combination. You can only carry it.

For a lot of long-term expats, the return is where migratory grief shows up in a way that catches them off guard. It’s not only about missing your “there” from “here”. It’s also the ache of realizing the version of self that used to fit seamlessly into the hometown rulebook has changed in ways that your “there” never got to witness. The grief travels in both directions.

If you’ve returned somewhere after years away and found yourself in a supermarket aisle, or at a family table, feeling slightly out of step in a place that should feel automatic, I want you to know this experience has a shape.

It isn’t proof that you chose wrong, or that you’ve broken something you can’t fix. It may simply mean you went far enough, and long enough, for the going to become part of who you are.

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Living with who you are now

The work now isn’t to force yourself back into the earlier version of you this place remembers.

It’s to live carefully with the person you’ve become, even when the setting around you is still catching up.

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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