When I moved to London at the end of 2022, I was incredibly homesick. It wasn’t like the homesickness I’d felt at university – this time I loved the city and the people more than I knew what to do with, but instead it was a sort of longing for something that didn’t exist anymore. I knew that this move was the big one. This was the decision to take my life in a certain direction, and it was fuelled by both excitement and fear. I felt so ready to shed the limitations of living in my childhood town, but I was also acutely aware that once I crossed the threshold, I would never find myself back there in quite the same way again.

On the day I left – for a change so big that I almost refused to acknowledge it at the time – I did the rounds to say goodbye to my family. Dotted all over my hometown were the houses that had raised me; my cousins who lived next door (a portal between our two gardens in the way of a missing fence panel), my cousins who lived on the other side of town (no more than a 6 minute drive away), my grandparents’ house down the road (the site of every Christmas and every birthday), and the homes that belonged to the parents of all of my best friends. This was what I was saying goodbye to, twenty three years of home.

It was in the new year, about four months after we moved, that my sense of ‘home’ change. I gradually felt able to straddle both parts of my life – the one that would always be waiting for me at the end of a train ride, and this new, exciting one that I had carved out for myself. I didn’t ever think it was possible to feel that way about two places at once; I always assumed I’d feel like I was missing something. But I had love waiting for me on both sides of the fence, and I knew that I’d be safe in either.

There is a silence I notice now when I go back to Surrey. Even in the busiest parts of town, there is a slowness that is absent in London. It is the gentle ticking of a place full of people who have already done that part of their life, and now find themselves in the suburbs with a past behind them and a family around them. It’s hard to believe now that so much of who I am and who I will always be was derived from growing up there.

My family home is the picture of my mother, and so much of her is woven throughout it: the colours on the walls, the furniture in the front room, the perfectly disorganised filing cabinet. There is no part of that house that she didn’t touch, and when I’m there I can feel her all around me. It is the most comforting feeling, and also one of the most difficult.

The past 16 months that I’ve spent living in London have been formative in a way that I never could have predicted. I have learnt so much about myself being here, I have made friends I will keep for life, and I have rediscovered parts of myself that I considered lost to anxiety and grief; if only I could go back and tell myself that things would be OK.

I started to write this blog post a while ago, and I left these notes for myself so I wouldn’t forget what I wanted to say. They are as follows:

1. something about bus rides home
2. something about walking through a shopping centre feeling calm and not anxious
3. something about sitting in my room and watching the canal

I’ll go from the bottom up. I spent my first year of university at Queen Mary in east London, before transferring to Exeter in my second year. As a 19-year-old, I found London a vast and lonely place – and I really only made it through that year because of the small group of friends I’d made and my ability to go back home most weekends. My halls sat alongside Regent’s Canal, and I can’t count the hours I spent watching the gentle life on the water from my window. I was so jealous of the people who could moor up their boats and then move further upstream whenever they wanted to – as though they had a freedom that I didn’t yet have access to. There were swans that would float up and down during the night time, and a cat that lived on one of the canal boats who would gracefully hop from boat to bank and back again. It was sometimes the only thing that would pace my heartbeat – and I remember wondering if I would ever feel at home there.

Number 2 is about the most mundane activity you could imagine doing on a Sunday afternoon. And it’s one I can do easily 80% of the time now, but there were so many years where that 80% looked more like 25%, and my ability to feel like a ‘normal’ person felt so far from reach. I wondered if I would ever be able to leave the house without having to hype myself up for a good half an hour, or if I would be able to stop noticing the smaller details of my surroundings that went unnoticed by most. And now I find myself at 24 about as normal as I’ll ever be and happier than I ever was – all it took was time.

Finally, and perhaps a good way to end this blog post, my favourite bus route: the 52 to Victoria. The bus I take to the station when it’s time to go home home. It runs down through Kensington High Street and along the bottom of Hyde Park, and I always feel so tiny when I’m on it, because London feels so big. I often wonder what it would be like to be a first-time tourist in London, and experience the city in this way – from the bus window. An expansive stretch of history that looks different each corner you turn. I spoke to my uncle about this once, after I told him that being on the 52 almost made me melancholy, because London seemed so untouchable to me in those moments – the undeniable fact that I’ll never get to experience all of it. There will always be a street I haven’t walked down, or a restaurant I haven’t tried, and how is it possible that I exist here too, amongst all of this? But it was in recognising that I, too, was part of it all, that London became home to me in the way I had wished for at 19.