What it means to belong when home is between cultures
Home is more than a place, it’s a feeling, a shelter for the moments that have shaped us. It lives in the warmth of memory, in the laughter of loved ones, in the stillness of solitude. Home is where comfort lingers, where belonging takes root, where each heart shapes its own meaning. For some, it’s steady and enduring, anchored to a single landscape, a town that holds their history, a place where every street is familiar. For others, however, home is less certain. It is not a single point on a map but a shifting horizon, always moving with them.
To live abroad is to learn this truth intimately. It is to arrive in a new land with the imprint of another still etched within you. The familiar scents, sounds, and gestures of the place you once called home echo in memory, even as new ones rush in to take their place. You learn to navigate the rhythms of a different language, to shape your mouth around unfamiliar syllables, to stitch together belonging in a culture that is not yet yours. Slowly, new rituals form, but the old ones remain, woven into the fabric of who you are. In this way, home becomes layered, made not only of where you are, but of everywhere you have been.
The Portuguese word saudade captures something of this feeling: a deep, aching nostalgia, a longing for what is absent but still alive in the heart. For those who live far from where they began, saudade becomes a quiet companion. It is the memory of the sea you no longer see, the voice you can no longer hear daily, the landscape that shaped you but no longer surrounds you. Yet saudade is not only sorrow. It carries with it tenderness, a reminder that what you miss has shaped you, and that the act of missing itself is proof of love. To feel saudade is to carry a bridge between worlds, like an invisible thread that binds you to both the past and the present.
This is the paradox of in-betweenness. For those who leave, home is never entirely here or there. It is both, and sometimes neither. You may find yourself at once rooted and unmoored, belonging everywhere and nowhere. The streets of your childhood no longer wholly recognize you, yet the streets of your present life do not entirely claim you either. And yet, in this in-between, something profound takes shape: a recognition that home is not a fixed destination but a living dialogue. It is an act of creation, of remembering and reimagining, of carrying fragments from one place to another and weaving them into something new.
Perhaps this is the gift of displacement: the chance to understand home as multiplicity. To see that it does not have to be singular or narrow, but can hold diversity within it. Home can be the lullaby in one language and the laughter in another, the food of your childhood and the flavors you come to love later, the memories you carry and the ones you are still making. It can live in more than one landscape, more than one story, more than one self. Home can be plural, expansive, and rich with contrast, something that grows as we grow.
In the end, home may not be one place, but many. It may be a mosaic of moments, voices, landscapes, and languages that together form the ground beneath your feet. To live abroad is to learn that home can expand with you, that it can be both the soil of your origin and the space you inhabit now, the ache of longing and the joy of discovery, the echo of what has been and the promise of what is still to come. Home, then, is not only where we are, but who we are becoming, wherever we choose to stand.