Homesick in Your Hometown, Fluent in Elsewhere
I am thirty-nine years old and I have never felt like I belong anywhere, including the place I was born.
Standing in the market where my mother used to buy vegetables, surrounded by vendors who’ve known me since I could barely see over their counters, I am as foreign to myself as I would be in Tokyo. The language in my mouth feels borrowed. The faces that should trigger recognition trigger only a vague sadness, like looking at photographs of people you know you should remember but don’t.
This is the loneliness no one talks about—being a stranger in your own story.
The fruit seller calls me by name, asks about Happy, about little Arash. He remembers when I was small, running between the stalls while my mother haggled over the price of onions. But the boy he’s remembering feels like someone else’s childhood, someone else’s collection of summers and scraped knees and afternoon prayers echoing from the mosque next door.
How do you explain to someone that you can be homesick in your hometown?
I watch the other men my age, the ones who never left, who married girls from neighboring streets and inherited their fathers’ businesses. They move through these alleys with the confidence of belonging, their bodies at home in spaces that recognize them. They are fluent in a language I forgot how to speak—the language of staying, of roots that grow deeper instead of wider.
But then I think about the places I’ve tried to make home—different cities, different jobs, different versions of myself I wore like clothes that never quite fit. In each new place, I was sure this time would be different. This time I’d belong. But everywhere I went, I carried this same restless stranger, this person who observes life from just outside the frame.
Maybe the problem isn’t the places. Maybe the problem is believing that belonging is something you find rather than something you create.
Arash asked me yesterday why some birds migrate and others stay in the same tree their whole lives. I told him I didn’t know, but I’ve been thinking about his question ever since. Are we the migratory type or the nesting type? And what happens when you’re built for migration but long for roots?
The strange comfort is this: I’ve learned that displacement can be a form of clarity. When you don’t quite belong anywhere, you see everything more clearly. You notice the small rituals that make a place feel like home to others. You understand that belonging is often just familiarity wearing a mask of deeper meaning.
Tonight, walking through the neighborhood where I grew up, I make peace with my permanent foreignness. I will always be the one who notices what others take for granted. I will always carry the particular sadness of the perpetual observer. But maybe that’s not a defect. Maybe that’s a superpower.
What if not belonging anywhere means you can belong everywhere?
