Home is a place.
The house I left behind, September 2026
As you can tell by the amount of time it took me to publish my next post, the last few months have been a whirlwind. Between my unique Twizy roadtrip across the country, a very short summer break and several moves within Hamburg, I have barely been able to put my foot down and arrive. I knew the first months were going to be stressful - and they were. Not exclusively, but certainly predominantly.
As with every change in life, there are phases. The initial excitement about the endless possibilities in front of me inevitably morphed into a more narrow field of vision as the regular work load alongside my psychology degree and administrative responsibilities caught up with me a few weeks into my new life. Lots of exploring I was going to do ended up not happening - yet. I’m not giving up on the feeling of adventure I felt when I first arrived, so I’m still trying to carve out those moments for myself where I just take the subways someplace I’ve never been and see where my feet take me. There is so much to be seen.
Like I said before, I have never permanently relocated so far away from where I grew up. Sure, I lived in London for a while and I played with the idea of staying there for good as it became clear that I wasn’t going to end up becoming a teacher like I had initially planned. In those moments, when the entire deck is being reshuffled, I tend to be open to bold solutions. Like staying in London, like moving to Hamburg. The latter was the first time I actually carried it out.
Our family is deeply rooted in the place I grew up in. At least three generations before me have lived here, with only a few family members ever moving away for good. On my maternal side, I have a very common last name in our valley and it’s not unusual that my class mates’ grand parents also went to the same school together. The village I come from still only has 2,000 residents and as of today, there is no grocery store, the bus runs every one to two hours and there are barns and ‘Backhiesl’, little stone houses for baking bread, along the streets, following the small stream that shapes the village to this day. Driving into the valley, the mountains in the background setting a beautiful scene, always gives me a sense of peace and belonging.
I don’t think I need to elaborate on why Hamburg is very, very different from that. A lot of my class mates moved away after school or uni, many of them ending up in the bigger cities like Frankfurt, Berlin - or Hamburg. Not all of them have as big of a family connection to our small town in the South but many still go there for Christmas and we meet up when we can, sharing stories about our lives since we’ve last seen each other. And while I think most of us agree that we can feel ‘at home’ somewhere else, the German ‘Heimat’, ‘home home’, as I like to call it sometimes, cannot be established somewhere else (if you have it at all, depending on how you grew up).
I knew that after the turbulent summer I was scheduled to be ‘home home’ in late September for two and a half weeks, both for work and for taking care of the rest of my belongings that I hadn’t so far been able to transport North. To be honest, I was a little anxious about that. Whenever things are still uncertain and new, the allure of something so familiar and stable can be a big pull, and I didn’t want to feel any doubts about my move North. My parents still being out of the country for a few weeks, I knew I was going to be alone on the property, the weather was going to be great, as it almost always is in late September, and I was going to be, at least, temporarily, freed from any work responsibilities and other demands my new life imposes on me. Maybe, I thought, I am going to feel like it’s easier and more comfortable to slip back into what I know.
Those concerns came on the back of a very stressful time in the summer in a temporary apartment. My normal accomodation had initially been a sublease for two months. The previous tenants were due to return for the summer and then leave permanently, so I knew I could take over the apartment after that, I just had to spend the summer someplace else. That someplace ended up being a dirty souterrain flat infested with silverfish (the bigger, cellulose-eating type though) and a host of other problems. Whether it was a power outage or the fire alarm going off right above my bed in the middle of the night (and you couldn’t take the battery out), it quickly became incredibly stressful to be in this environment. Upon my arrival, the fridge, the washing machine and the dishwasher had all been moldy, I was almost stroke down by a bathroom cabinet that wasn’t attached to the wall and for some reason there was no bedroom door. I had nightmares a lot and woke up restless. The move back included me scrutizining every single item I owned, including every sock and shoe, for insects before packing them up airtight so I wouldn’t carry anything over. The final two weeks, my body succumbed and I got sick.
These days, almost every respectable mattress outlet will sell you pillows saying ‘Home is where your heart is’ or, in case of the tiny house movement, ‘home is where you park it’. The general consensus seems to be that home isn’t necessarily a geographical location. That it depends on the people around you if you feel it or not. While I think, yes, feeling ‘at home’ is heavily dependent on the social landscape, I don’t think that’s quite true for ‘home home’. You can absolutely relocate across the country and feel comfortable in your new surroundings. Thankfully, my actual aparment that I was able to return to a few weeks ago is such a place. Big trees in front of the windows, all kinds of birds, freshly renovated rooms. Eventually, it will stop feeling new and start feeling familiar. But I can safely say that the level of familiarity you feel around the place you spent your entire childhood and youth in will not transition over to a new city.
And that’s okay. As I arrived here in the South, suitcases stacked in suitcases so I’d have enough room on the way back to bring as much as possible, I felt almost overwhelmed by how well I knew my neighborhood. I drove around town to run my errands, visited family members and took walks down memory lane and yes, most of it brought a sense of comfort I can’t yet experience in my new surroundings on the other end of Germany. But it also became apparent that while it was reassuring to feel all these things and to know that ‘home home’ was still there, this wasn’t the place I was meant to be in permanently right now. Comfort is not the only thing we need, and even comfort can run out of fuel after a while. I decided to move away because there are opportunities out there, lives to live, that I can’t find where I come from. Whether I will stay in the city forever, I can’t possibly know. But staying ‘home home’ will feel like I missed out on a lot of things I should explore. I would buy present relief through future resentment. And I’m not ready to do that.
Despite, it would be an unfair comparison. Now that I’ve moved out of my tiny house and all my admin and work responsibilities are somewhere else, visiting home is exactly this - a visit. No obligations outside family and friends, time off from duties you’d normally have to cram in between late shifts. Of course it feels like a relief. And it’s actually nice to create a place where this can reliably happen, where I can take time off of what I’m building someplace else. That way, ‘home home’ now has a new role for me. A place of respite. And maybe, one day, it will grow into an additional ‘at home’ again too. I still haven’t given up on the idea of maybe one day owning a house in the village I’m from. I really, really like it there. Let’s see what the future holds. When I first decided to move to Hamburg, a colleague and I were working with modeling clay one day and I decided to make a compass, the needle pointing North and all that. I smiled when I realized that the other side of the needle will inevitably point South. I retain the connection to both places and they get to play their own respective role.
Sure, home is so much more than a place. The reason it feels that way is because you’ve made all these memories - with people or on your own. And you can absolutely make new memories someplace else, which is especially important if ‘home home’ has more negative connotations for you than positive ones. My own relationship with my home town is ambivalent at times, too. My youth wasn’t smooth sailing and a lot of those memories are attached to this place as well. But that’s the point. It is a place, too. The changes in infrastructure, in the landscape and in the people reflect a little bit of what’s going on in the world. It grows alongside you in a sense, but at the core, at least to me, it will always feel a certain type of way because I know it so well from such a young age. And it’s reassuring I can return to it whenever I like as I’m going out there and finding out what’s beyond the horizon.