Why does going home feel like starting over?

on living abroad and learning that maybe some versions of ourselves never fit back into old places

Can a city be the love of your life?

It’s been a little over a month since I left New York and moved back home to India. I keep wanting to say I’ve been grieving, but that still doesn’t feel like a big enough word. How do you say goodbye to the love of your life?

For me, that love has always been New York.

I was fourteen when I decided I would live there one day. Nine years later, at twenty-three, I did. Every late night, every rejection, every detour, every impossible-looking hurdle suddenly made sense the moment I looked out of my airplane window and saw that unmistakable skyline waiting for me below.

For five years, I got to call that impossible dream of mine “home”.

The City

People have a lot to say about living in New York. The eye-watering rent, the unhinged characters everyone pretends not to notice, the chance encounters that change your life overnight, and the endless stream of people passing through. Most of those clichés are true.

The one people rarely talk about is this: New York is also a village.

I’ve bumped into people I knew on street corners, in subway stations, on buses, and once while sprinting through the labyrinth that is Fulton Street station to catch a train. I missed the train because we stopped to chat. For a city of eight million people, it has an uncanny way of making the world feel surprisingly small.

It’s also as ruthless as it is romantic. The moment you become the smartest person in the room, you know it’s time to find a smarter one. Written down, it sounds exhausting. Living it rarely feels that way because you’re too busy saying yes to another coffee chat, another networking event, another recommendation, another version of yourself waiting to be discovered.

For all the ways New York is described as lonely, I found it to be one of the kindest places I’d ever lived. Not because people were outwardly warm, but because they understood what it meant to be trying. Trying to build a career, trying to build a community, trying to become someone.

The city rewards ambition, but it also rewards vulnerability. Some of the most meaningful conversations I had began with someone admitting they were struggling, convinced they’d just said something embarrassing. Instead, heads around the room would nod in quiet recognition. I’d never seen kindness feel so tangible.

‘For the Firsts’ is a professional meet-up club in NYC founded by Colin Rocker

Maybe that’s why New York felt more like home than home ever had. It gave me something I’d been searching for long before I knew how to articulate it: permission. Permission to ask questions, permission to be loud, and permission to take up space without apologizing for it.

Looking back, I think that’s one of the greatest gifts living abroad gives you. Distance from the expectations you inherited. Distance from the versions of yourself other people insist on remembering. Distance long enough to ask a frightening question: Who am I when nobody already knows me?

It’s terrifying, but it’s also unbelievably freeing. Maybe that’s why so many people come home feeling different. Not because another country changed them, but because it finally gave them enough room to become themselves.

There is something deeply reassuring about a place that’s large enough to accommodate everyone’s version of becoming.

The Turning Point

It wasn’t that everything I’d worked for was coming to an end.

It was that nobody had prepared me for the quiet that follows when you finally arrive.

For years, I’d been chasing the next milestone. Get into a graduate program. Find a job. Build a career. Stay in the country. Figure out the visa. Renew the lease. Save enough money. Make more friends. Explore another neighborhood. There was always another mountain to climb.

Until there wasn’t.

I remember sitting on my couch, staring out at the Lower Manhattan skyline. That view made me think of fourteen-year-old me almost every day. I’d somehow built a life I used to see only as a Windows screensaver.

The view from my home and my first big girl purchase — a white couch

I had made a home in a city that came with a giant terms and conditions apply label, where impermanence sat quietly beneath almost every decision. Every lease had an expiry date. Every job came with visa considerations. Every long-term plan carried an invisible asterisk.

Still, it was home.

Sometimes I wonder if that’s what adulthood really is. Learning that permanence was never promised, and choosing to love people and places anyway.

I’m proud of how far I came. An average student from a small town in Gujarat who was always told she talked too much, asked too many questions, and took up too much space. Funny enough, those became the very things that opened doors I never imagined walking through.

Talking. Wondering. Raising my hand before I knew the answer. Approaching strangers with curiosity instead of judgment.

The qualities that once made me feel out of place became the very reasons I found my people.

Looking back now, I don’t think moving abroad changed me. I think it revealed me.

The Goodbye

So when it came time to move back home, I was shattered and relieved in equal measure.

Shattered because it’s no small thing to leave a place you’ve poured so much of yourself into, especially when it has loved you back tenfold. Relieved because every long-distance daughter knows the quiet guilt of watching her parents grow older through a phone screen. You stop counting birthdays and start counting ordinary Tuesdays. A quick dinner. A doctor’s appointment. An evening spent watching television together. The moments you miss are rarely the milestones. They’re the ordinary days you’ll never get back.

By then, my nervous system had forgotten what it felt like to exhale. I was living from one deadline to the next: work, visa renewals, rent, bills, and the next thing demanding my attention. Rest became something I believed I had to earn, and even then I struggled to enjoy it. How could I spend a day doing nothing when every day in my favorite city felt borrowed?

What scared me most, though, wasn’t leaving New York. It was going back.

I don’t think enough people talk about what moving abroad does to your relationship with home. You leave as one version of yourself and return as another, only to discover that home has kept moving without you. The streets are familiar. The food tastes the same. The people still remember who you used to be. Only you’re different.

For a while, you exist in a strange in-between. You’re too foreign for the place you came from and not quite local enough for the place you left behind. You find yourself translating pieces of your life that no longer fit neatly into either world, hoping someone else understands the version of you that was shaped somewhere in the middle.

Around that time, I came across the title of a Medium essay that I haven’t been able to forget: “Hometown has never been kind to its women, but a rented apartment in an unknown city somewhere accepts her.” It put words to a feeling I’d been carrying for years.

I wasn’t afraid of moving back to India. I was afraid of moving back into an older version of myself. One that had spent years apologizing for taking up space, shrinking her ambitions, and wondering whether she was asking for too much. That was the version I’d worked the hardest to outgrow.

So, with all of those anxieties swirling in my head, I did the only thing that made sense. I fell in love with the city one last time.

One last love letter

I spent my last few weeks in New York doing something I hadn’t done in years.

I stopped rushing.

For the first time since moving there, I wasn’t trying to optimize every hour of my day. I wasn’t squeezing in errands between meetings or calculating whether I had enough time to catch another train before dinner. I let the city unfold at its own pace, and for once, I was willing to follow.

I wandered through the West Village with nowhere to be. I ate alone at my favorite little Thai restaurant in the East Village. I sat in parks without my phone or AirPods, letting myself people-watch the way New Yorkers pretend they aren’t being watched. I struck up conversations with strangers at farmers’ markets and took photos of every. single. thing.

The sunsets seemed more orange than I remembered. The Hudson caught the light just right. Even the pigeons I’d spent five years complaining about suddenly felt so quintessentially New York that one afternoon, I found myself feeding them bits of bread. I finally made my way through museums that had lived on my “someday” list for years. I chatted with security guards because I was convinced they knew the stories no exhibit label ever could. Not just about the art, but about the people who came to see it. One particularly crisp summer afternoon, I biked the entire loop around Central Park. The breeze was still cool enough to make me forget it was May, and for a little while, I felt like I was flying.

I ended that day at a tiny Italian restaurant with a handmade pizza and a glass of crisp white wine. I sat there journaling as the sun dipped below the buildings and blue hour slowly washed over the city. Apartment windows flickered on one by one, glowing amber against the evening sky.

I remember crying quietly into my wine. Not because I was saying goodbye. Because I couldn’t believe this ordinary Tuesday had become my ordinary life. The kind of freedom I’d stumbled into, where an entire day could be guided only by my own curiosity, had once felt impossible for a fourteen-year-old girl growing up in Gujarat.

Every neighborhood carried a different version of me.

Manhattan reminded me of the student who said yes to everything. Running between classes at The New School. Wandering through Union Square because I had nowhere else to be. Convincing friends to let me join them for lunch at their offices just so I could see what the inside of a Big Four firm looked like. Sneaking into Pilates classes on borrowed ClassPass credits. Ducking into independent bookstores and little gift shops, buying souvenirs I absolutely didn’t have suitcase space for because somehow they all felt necessary.

Brooklyn held a different kind of possibility. I’d walk through Brooklyn Heights imagining the life I might have had if I’d stayed. Which brownstone would I choose? Would I finally get that golden retriever I’d spent years talking about? Would I know the names of the people at the neighborhood wine shop? The questions didn’t make me sad. They made me grateful that I’d lived long enough in a place to imagine a future there.

Looking back, I don’t think I was trying to see more of New York. I was trying to notice it, as though I could freeze it in my memory before time inevitably blurred its edges.

New York on my Olympus film camera — Summer 2026

We spend so much of our lives moving through places convinced they’ll always be there. It isn’t until we’re about to leave that we begin paying attention. The walk we’ve taken a hundred times suddenly feels beautiful. The barista remembers our order. The subway musician we’ve ignored for years somehow sounds extraordinary.

Maybe that’s what grief does. It teaches us to notice. And for those last few weeks, I noticed everything.

So in the meantime…

I’m writing this from a café in Bengaluru.

On my phone, which feels unusual because I made myself a promise not to bring my laptop on this trip to my best friend’s apartment. Old me would’ve called that unproductive. Current me is trying very hard not to.

Hole in The Wall Indiranagar, Bengaluru

If I squint long enough, Cubbon Park almost looks like Central Park. The trees create the same canopy. People read on benches. Dogs chase squirrels with unwavering optimism. Someone is always jogging with an expression that suggests they’re training for something far more important than a 10K.

The resemblance makes me smile. The difference makes me exhale.

Cubbon Park, Bengaluru

For the first time in years, my nervous system isn’t racing against a clock I can’t control. I’m no longer making decisions around visa deadlines or wondering whether I’ll have to pack my life into two suitcases with thirty days’ notice. I’m not trying to optimize every weekend because this might be my last summer in the city.
Time feels different now. Slower. More generous.

For a while, I thought what I missed most about New York was the city itself. I was wrong.

What I missed was the version of myself that existed there. The woman who introduced herself before waiting to be invited into the conversation. Who asked strangers questions because she was genuinely curious. Who believed she belonged in rooms she’d only dreamed about a few years earlier. Who wasn’t waiting for permission to become herself.

The beautiful thing is that she boarded the flight with me.

I’ve spent the past month realizing that the places that change us don’t disappear when we leave them. They become part of the way we move through the world. The questions we ask, the risks we take, the standards we refuse to lower, the people we choose, the life we insist on building.

Maybe that’s why coming home has felt so strange. I wasn’t returning as the person who left India five years ago. I was introducing everyone, including myself, to someone new. And maybe that’s what home asks of us eventually. Not to shrink ourselves until we fit an older version of our lives. But to trust that the people and places who love us will learn us again.

I still miss New York. I suspect I always will. Some loves are simply too formative to outgrow.

But I’ve stopped worrying that leaving the city means leaving behind the person I became there. She isn’t waiting for me somewhere on a Manhattan street corner. She came home with me.

Maybe that’s what the meantime really is.
Not the space between two places.
The space between who you were and who you finally gave yourself permission to become.