Home Is Not a Place, It’s a Feeling

When you grow up between cultures,
the question “Where are you from?”
becomes both familiar and frustrating.

Is it where you were born?
Where you were raised?
Where your parents are from?
Where your childhood photos were taken?
Or is it somewhere else, somewhere unmarked on any map, but deeply alive in your memory?

What if home isn’t a location at all
but a feeling you carry?
A rhythm in your speech.
A scent in your kitchen.
A pause in your breath when someone finally pronounces your name correctly.

In the Arab world, home is often communal.
It exists in the plural.
It sounds like five people talking over one another.
It smells like cardamom, za’atar, jasmine, and something always simmering.
It looks like slippers at the door, tea that’s never optional, and someone insisting you eat even if you just did.
It feels like being known without needing to explain, even when you don’t fully agree with the people who raised you.

In the West, home can feel quieter.
More individual.
Sometimes freer, you can choose who you want to be, how you want to live.
But sometimes lonelier, too.
You may have your own space, even your own rules, but miss the noise.
Miss the interruptions.
Miss the we.

And so, you start to build a definition of home that no culture gave you,
but both helped shape.

A song in Arabic on a long drive, even if you haven’t been fluent in years.
A meal your grandmother used to make, now recreated from memory, not measurement.
A WhatsApp voice note from a cousin halfway across the world, filled with laughter and words you didn’t realize you missed.
The familiar ache of longing, for a place, a person, a version of yourself that only exists in between.

Home becomes a series of small, sacred things.
It’s not just a place you return to.
It’s a feeling that returns to you.
Sometimes in unexpected moments:
A shared glance.
A certain kind of bread.
A memory unlocked by music.

You learn to carry it all.
To build home in your friendships.
In a lover who asks about your culture and listens closely to the answer.
In a city that lets you be both loud and quiet.
In moments where you feel safe to be all of who you are, without shrinking, performing, or translating.

This piece explores the emotional geography of identity, how it stretches across continents, languages, and generations.
It’s for anyone who has had to redefine home over and over again, because they left, or fled, or grew, or simply needed to breathe differently.

And it’s a reminder that for those of us navigating between East and West:
Home is not something we always find.
It’s something we create.
Piece by piece.
Word by word.
Memory by memory.

Not fixed.
But evolving.
Not inherited.
But deeply, unapologetically yours.

And in that creation, something beautiful happens:
You stop searching for one perfect place to belong
and start realising you already do.

Right here.
In the in-between.
In the both/and.
In yourself.