A Place Without Walls: When Home Became Something I Could Carry

I’ve never been someone who felt deeply attached to a single place.

Even when my family was intact—when there was a husband, young children, and a shared life—I felt most alive in motion. We moved often. New cities, new countries, new landscapes. Once, we even took our children out of school for two years and took to the road entirely.

Our youngest was just two years old and would sometimes talk of missing home. When

we packed up after a week in a rental or a couple of nights in a hotel, we were very

intentional with our language, telling her, “It’ s OK, W e’re going to a new home.” The

older kids always managed to get her excited about the prospect.

And it was true.

As long as we were together, we were home.

My then husband and I were good at this. Truly good.

We knew how to arrive somewhere new and make a life—getting the kids settled into schools, building friendships, creating a household that felt warm and secure. I was proud of that. It felt like evidence of resilience, adaptability, and trust—like a kind of competence, a quiet superpower.

That understanding served us beautifully for a long time. It gave our children a sense of safety rooted in connection rather than walls. It allowed me to honor a natural rhythm of expansion and change without questioning it too deeply.

Still, I noticed how attached the world around us was to permanence.

When we moved to England—my ex-husband’s home country—someone asked if it was a permanent move. I remember the resistance that rose in my body before I even answered. Permanence felt heavy to me. Like a promise that I couldn’t keep.

I used to deflect with humor.

“I just have a short attention span,” I’d say with a shrug and a helpless smile.

“I need to move on every four or five years.”

It was easier than explaining something I hadn’t yet fully articulated.

When my marriage ended, I really saw for the first time how tenuous it was to locate home in a person or a shared address.

What I realized—slowly, honestly, and without drama—was that I had been relying on my husband’s presence to feel safe. I had attached a great deal of security to being part of a family unit that moved together. To the shared identity of we. To the familiar rhythm of building a life as a team.

And without that external anchor, I was being asked to establish something new.

A sense of safety that lived inside me.

A home that could not be lost, left, or dismantled.

My first move without my husband was genuinely scary.

That surprised me. I had moved to Tokyo alone at twenty-four. Independence wasn’t new to me. And yet this move—just me and my youngest daughter, in the middle of the COVID shutdown—carried a different weight.

I wondered if I had become complacent.

Or if there had been a kind of attachment issue I hadn’t fully examined.

What I know now is this: I was being asked to build safety differently.

Without the familiar scaffolding.

Without the shared identity of “we”.

Without the reassurance of doing what I’d always done well.

That first period was tender and insular. My daughter and I became a small, devoted team, searching for our way in a new place under extraordinary circumstances.

And we found it.

She eventually returned to in-person school and made friends. I joined a tennis club and began connecting with other women. A dear friend—someone I’ve known since my early Tokyo years, who also understands a life lived across many places—was nearby.

Her presence mattered more than I can say.

Bit by bit, a life took shape.

What really changed, though, was where I located home.

It was no longer in a shared address or a family configuration.

It was no longer something I could outsource.

Home became a relationship with myself.

A capacity to self-soothe.

A trust in my intuition.

A knowing that I could create belonging without depending on permanence—or another person—to provide it.What shifted wasn’t my relationship to movement—it was the meaning I gave to it.

Somewhere along the way, I had absorbed someone else’s idea that stability required permanence, that having more than one base meant being unrooted, that wanting to move on was a sign of restlessness rather than wisdom. None of those had ever been my lived experience.

Letting go of those borrowed definitions allowed me to return to what I had always known.

Home is no longer something I build around myself—it’s something I inhabit.

It lives in my body.

In my capacity to listen inward.

In the trust I have cultivated with myself.

This year, I’m preparing for another significant shift. Another move. And instead of bracing, I feel grounded anticipation.

Because I’m no longer asking a place—or a person—to be my home.

I carry it with me.

And I share this not because everyone needs to live this way, but because many people don’t realize it’s possible. It still surprises me when others ask about what I will do next, as though that’s the hard part! What I want to tell them is this:

That safety doesn’t have to come from permanence.

That belonging doesn’t require a single address.

That home can be something you become, rather than something you find.

Maybe the real question isn’t Where is home?

Maybe it’s: What would it feel like to live as if you could never lose it?

Wherever I end up next, I’m taking my sense of “home” with me.

What does home mean to you? I love hearing your thoughts on this topic so please post your thoughts below and start a discussion!

Next week’s post will pick up here and explore how my new sense of home affects my identity.