Where is home when I no longer feel fully at home here or there?

You return to Poland. The same streets, familiar places, a language that needs no translation, gestures and situations that for years felt completely obvious. It should feel familiar. There should be relief, perhaps even the sense of returning to something you know well. Yet sometimes something very different happens.

You look at the place you missed for months or years and realize that you no longer feel what you expected to feel. Something has changed, although it may be difficult to name exactly what. Then you return to the country where you live now and discover that you do not always feel entirely at home there either. That is when a question appears that many people living abroad carry with them more often than they would like to admit:

Where is home now?

Living abroad changes your point of reference

When you spend most of your life in one country, a huge part of daily life becomes so familiar that you barely notice it. You speak your own language, understand the unwritten rules, and know how things work at a government office, a store, a school, or around the family table. You understand how people joke, show affection, argue, and build relationships. All of this creates a point of reference that quietly operates in the background and gives life a sense of predictability.

After moving abroad, many of those elements disappear almost at once. You have to learn a new system, new cultural codes, and new ways of functioning. Relationships have to be built from the beginning, ordinary tasks require more attention, and differences you once never thought about suddenly become very visible. Over time, however, you discover that it is not only the world around you that changes. The way you see yourself changes too.

Sometimes what we miss is not simply the place itself, but the entire context connected to it: the people, the sense of safety, the period of life when everything seemed more obvious, and the version of ourselves who knew how to function in a familiar and predictable world. That is why you can miss Poland deeply and still return there only to realize that you no longer quite fit in the way you once did.

The Poland you return to after several years is not exactly the Poland you left either. People have their own lives, parents are older, friendships have changed, cities look a little different, and places that once held enormous meaning in your memory may now seem surprisingly ordinary. Most importantly,we ourselves are no longer exactly the people who once left.

Between two worlds

One sentence that often appears in conversations among people living abroad sounds something like this: “I don't fit there anymore, but I'm not sure I fully fit here either.” It captures one of the most recognizable stages of life abroad.

You can have a home, a job, a family, and friends and still occasionally feel suspended between two worlds. You are no longer exactly the person who once left, but you may not always feel completely part of the place where you live now either. This does not mean moving abroad was a mistake or that something has gone wrong. Sometimes it simply means that the old point of reference is no longer enough while the new one is still being built.

One of the most difficult parts of living abroad is realizing that life in your home country continues while you are not there. Parents grow older, weddings happen, birthdays pass, children are born, families gather, and all the ordinary moments that once belonged to your everyday life continue. You can talk by phone, see one another on a screen, send photos, and stay in touch almost every day, but even frequent conversations do not always replace ordinary physical presence.

Over time, another difficult realization may appear: the people you left behind learned to live without your everyday presence, just as you learned to function without theirs beside you. The love may remain the same, but the relationship itself is often no longer exactly what it once was.

Home does not always have to be one place

For a long time, you may try to answer whether home is Poland or the country where you live now, as though only one of those answers can be correct. Yet after several years abroad, the meaning of home often begins to change.

Home can be a physical place, but it can also be a person, a family, a ritual, a language, a group of people, or the feeling that you can simply be yourself without constantly explaining who you are and where you come from. Part of you may always remain connected to the place you left, while at the same time you may build something real somewhere else. Those two things do not have to cancel each other out.

Perhaps this is why the question “where is home?” does not always require one final answer. Sometimes it matters more to understand what you need in order to feel at home, which parts of your earlier life still matter to you, what you have built since leaving, and what you have learned about yourself. It can also help to notice what no longer fits the person you are today and what kind of life you want now, rather than the life you imagined several years ago when you first decided to move abroad.

Living abroad does not have to mean choosing between “there” and “here.” Sometimes it becomes the first time you consciously decide what you want to carry forward from the past, what you want to leave behind, and what you want to build next.

You do not need to know the answer immediately

When I moved from Poland to the United States several years ago, living abroad surprised me more than I expected. Despite my psychology background and many years of professional experience working with people, I was not prepared for everything that this change would set in motion. My surroundings, relationships, motherhood, and the way I saw myself all changed. Over time, I understood that moving abroad had not changed only my address.It had changed my point of reference, and with it many things that had once seemed obvious.

That is one reason this subject feels so close to me today.

You do not have to know today whether you want to stay, return, change jobs, rebuild a relationship, or begin again somewhere else. Sometimes the first step is not making a decision. It is seeing clearly where you are now, what is already working in your life, what no longer works, and what you need in order to move forward in a way that feels like your own.