This year we as Relocation Psychologists share more ideas and information around topics like #relocating #culturalonboarding #livingabroad #spousesupport #TCK #expatriation here in our blog and also on our company Relocation Psychologists site on Linked in. Last week already started with a blog and post about culture shock. Today we are talking about the meaning of home. On Linked in we are also asking your opinion on this topic. We truly hope our posts will be something useful for our international network and we are also eager to hear more about your ideas and thoughts. 
For this topic we got inspired while reading “Long May You Run – A global Nomad’s Search for Home” (2022) a collection of essays by Adele Barlow. How does it feel and what you actually think when as an adult with an international background as a Third Culture Kid (TCK) try to understand and find your home. She is finding help and understanding in therapy and slowly psychological themes like grieving process, commitment phobia and search for identity start to open up. To find out that for her home is not a place on a map or a person – it is a feeling of belonging for her. Something internal and strongly attached to her identity and set of values.
When interviewing some expats we found out that for one single person living years in different countries home is an international environment where she can feel free. For another expat who after fifteen years in Germany repatriated with her foreign husband and two TCKs to Finland it is many things. Her text was so beautiful we will add it here as she wrote it.
“For me, home is not one.
It can be an apartment, a neighbourhood, a landscape, a country. It can be a city you have a history in, so that its streets remind you of a thousand of moments. It can be a place you like to return to after travelling.
Home can be the feeling that you have the right to be just where you are, without needing to justify anything. A place you know how to navigate in.
Most of all, home is people. A social network built over time. A family – the one you were given by birth, or the one you chose to create and share your everyday life with. Friends you carry in your heart, no matter where you live.
And below all that, home is a vague feeling from the childhood, a smell, a taste, the sounds of a Saturday morning. A feeling of normality you try to recreate and reach all your life and often fail when living elsewhere.”
We would love to hear your comments and you can also leave you opinion in our poll on Linked In . Feel free to participate in the conversation. It is definitely going to be interesting and multisided.