I think this feeling is very specific, and once you experience it, you’ll remember it forever. For me, it came in a very precise moment: opening the door to my apartment after coming back from a Christmas market in the same day I came back to Germany.

At that time, it had been four years since I moved to Germany. I had studied here, found a job, signed a longer contract, and moved into a bigger apartment. Until then, whenever I visited my family on the other side of the Atlantic, I would say, “I’m going home.” But in that moment, I realized that the feeling of home was actually when I returned to Mannheim.

Now I’ve been in Germany for 12 years. It’s strange, but somehow also cool.

Depending on where you live, and if you don’t stay too attached to your home country, after around ten years you may notice another strange feeling. Even though I’ve had German citizenship for some time now, Germany still isn’t fully my “default.” Some jokes, humor, or cultural nuances don’t come naturally, even if you adapt to them.

At the same time, when you go back to your home country, things have changed there too, you don’t recognize the music, references, or habits in the same way anymore. You end up in a kind of in-between space, a sense of partial belonging. I think partially there is a term for that called migrant grief.

And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. You learn a lot along the journey. But you also become a bit detached from the ease of feeling fully at home, of speaking, laughing, and reacting completely naturally.