The Long Way Home: Why We Must Leave to Return

There’s a homecoming that requires departure first, and not just physically walking out the door, but truly leaving. Leaving behind who you thought you should be, the expectations, the version of yourself you performed for so long you almost forgot it was a performance.

It’s a paradox that makes no sense until you’ve lived it: sometimes the only way to find home is to lose it first.

Geography of Belonging

Some of us never leave the town we grew up in and spend our whole lives homesick. We repeat the same thoughts our parents thought, react with the same fears our families taught us, live within the same invisible boundaries drawn decades ago, and feel a persistent, inexplicable ache. We are surrounded by the familiar yet unable to truly inhabit our own lives.

Others journey far not necessarily in miles, but in thought, in risk, in the willingness to question everything. They venture into uncomfortable truths, challenge their deepest assumptions, sit with their shadows. Yet sometimes they find they’ve been carrying home in their body the entire time, waiting...

The Necessity of Getting Lost

Home is not always a place you return to; sometimes it’s a state of being you finally arrive at for the first time. And you can’t arrive "there" until you’ve been thoroughly, completely, and sometimes terrifyingly lost.

You have to get lost enough to stop asking for directions. You have to venture into ideas that frighten you and discover they’re less terrifying than ignorance. You have to sit with emotions you’ve spent years avoiding and find they don’t destroy you. You have to try on beliefs that contradict everything you were taught and see which ones actually fit. You have to break your own rules and discover some of them were prisons.

You have to fail at being someone else before you can succeed at being yourself.

There’s something about leaving our comfort zones whether that means boarding a plane or simply being honest for the first time. Away from our habitual patterns and the roles we’ve been assigned, we can experiment with different versions of ourselves. Some of these versions feel wrong immediately while others feel surprisingly right, revealing parts of ourselves we didn’t know existed.

And often the parts of ourselves we discover in unfamiliar territory are the very parts we’d been suppressing all along. The person who always swallowed their anger finally learning to set boundaries, the eternal optimist meeting grief, and the logical thinker discovering they’re also deeply intuitive.

The Permission to Choose

Leaving is not really about geography or circumstances, but about permission. Permission to question, to experiment, to fail, to change your mind. Permission to discover that the life you were running from might actually be the life you want.

When you’re trapped in other people’s expectations or your own rigid self-concept, home can feel like a cage. Every choice seems predetermined. The urge to escape is strongly insisting that there must be more, that you must find out who you are.

This leaving might look like moving across the world, or it might look like finally going to therapy. It might mean changing careers, or it might mean changing how you talk to yourself. It might be a physical journey or an entirely internal one, a dark night of the soul, a period of depression that forces you to rebuild from scratch, a loss that shatters your certainties and reveals what’s underneath.

Building Home From Scattered Pieces

So maybe home is not at all where you’re from or even where you return to. Home is what you build with the pieces of yourself you gather along the way. The parts you only found because you were brave enough, or desperate enough, or simply restless enough to go searching.

And each experience of leaving - leaving a comfort zone, a limiting belief, an old identity, a familiar pain, offers you another piece of the puzzle. You don’t know you’re collecting them. But years later, you look down and realize you’ve been building something all along.

The Door We Finally Walk Through

And sometimes the deepest journey is the one that brings you back to your own front door. Whether that’s a literal threshold or the threshold of self-acceptance, you are finally ready to walk through it as yourself.

Home, we realize, is not a place we leave or return to...It’s what we become when we stop running from ourselves. And sometimes we have to travel very far across continents or just across the terrain of our own psyche, through countries or through grief, into new cities or into the darkest corners of our own minds, before we’re ready to stand still and say: here. This. Me.

That’s what makes it home. Not the staying, but the choosing.