What a wonderful thing to miss

I can never go HOME home. Now what?

Can I admit something?

Something that might sound really bad?

I’ve got a predictable case of the post-honeymoon blues.

After a wonderful wedding and 3 incredible weeks of carbs, hand-squeezes on cobbled streets and gazing at my new husband over candlelight, we’re back to Brisbane (and reality) with a bump.

The quiet gifts of a trip that stretches on go beyond the luxury of waking up and wondering what day it is. I’ve had the indulgence of sitting back and pondering what I really actually want from this life.

I’m aware that I’m drowning in cliché right now. 30-something woman goes to Europe and contemplates life. Groundbreaking.

Aside from the usual summons that surface whenever I have a morsel of time to think: ‘must be creative, must write more, must think more’, the trip gave me pause to really evaluate my life in Australia and whether, after seven formative years, now is the time to start to thinking about really thinking about coming home to the UK.

Our wedding in Liverpool with my family and friends awoke an unexpected yearning in me. I’ve always vocally loved my life in Australia. I have amazing friends. The sun is less elusive. The people are happier. My career is going somewhere.

So why, for the first time, was I less than excited to return?

Maybe I know myself better now.

When I was diagnosed with ADHD last year and put the words Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria to the discomfort I’d been fighting forever, it hit me how much my constant masking has dimmed of spark of late.

I’d forgotten the privileged ease of surrounding myself with life-long friends and family who loved me before I had a label for my awkwardness, before medication, and before I bucked my ideas up and started really trying in life.

And now I’m starting to feel a little bit lost, because nagging at me as I contemplate the future is the fact that I can never go HOME home.

In the seven years I’ve been away, life at home has twisted and morphed into something that I no longer recognise.

My childhood home, a beautiful house in the north of Oxfordshire filled with laughter, the smell of my Dad’s cooking and creaky floorboards is now home to a new family.

My friends are on their own paths. Our cosy nights as housemates with cups of tea, hungover naps and shared spaghetti can’t exist in our new reality. Somewhere between coupling up, house moves and careers, the perils of schedules, distance and exhaustion crept in.

The home I’m aching for lives in pictures and keepsakes, and memories that feel like arms wrapped around me.

I left because I wanted more for myself.

First, it was travel, and then it was love that took me to and kept me on the other side of the world. And…go figure, now the thing that I’m craving is comfort and familiarity.

Whether it’s post-honeymoon blues or a pull that will eventually drag us back across an ocean, I hope one day my world will get a little smaller.

And while I’m longing for a past life, the inside jokes, the smell of basil in our shared kitchen, and the freedom and possibility of our mid-20s, I’m warmed to know I was lucky to have had it at all.

What a wonderful thing to miss.