In October 2025, I packed up my 15-pound hairless Xoloitzcuintli, Troy, and the rest of my belongings and moved from the north of England back to my hometown in California. I was exhausted, relieved, excited, heartbroken, and so hopeful.
I’d been living outside the US for 14 years — a year in Taiwan teaching English, followed by 13 in York. I was there for over a third of my life. I had no idea I’d stay so long. Those years brought growth and hard choices: a master’s degree, meeting and marrying a local, and a string of jobs unrelated to what I wanted, until I found work I cared about. I built a life through work, rugby, and volunteering, and could walk the medieval streets of York and run into someone I knew most days.
But underneath that friendliness, I was growing lonelier. Every new conversation brought the same questions: Where are you from? Why did you leave California? Will you move back? It took years to understand why. It was the feeling of always being othered, always just outside full belonging, no matter how hard I’d worked to build a life there.
Courtesy of Rebecca Mendoza.
What I thought I wanted versus what I actually needed
I hit some dark times and retreated inward for a few years. It was partly the pandemic, but mostly because life came at me all at once. My marriage hit a reckoning, and between May 2023 and May 2024, I lost four family members, including my eldest brother. Just as I gained the courage for a big change to move to Wales, I learned that an aunt was facing serious health issues. I flew home to care for her, pausing my move. I was suddenly living between two countries. It was also the longest I’d spent in my hometown since 2011, and I was forced to confront what actually made me happy, versus what I’d convinced myself I wanted.
I told myself California was temporary, I was just there for a few months to help out. But I started hiking the hills, watching the sun set over Monterey Bay, and spending time with friends, my mom, dad, sister, brother, nieces, and nephews. I began writing again after years of feeling stuck. I hadn’t wanted to move back to the US and had resisted the idea for years. But when I got honest with myself, I realized that although I can make anywhere a home, I really just wanted to be “home home.”
I made a few trips back and forth, packing what mattered and leaving the rest. I threw myself a goodbye party, left a secure job with nothing lined up, and spent my last two and a half months traveling the UK and continental Europe, closing out my to-do list, grieving, and hugging people goodbye without knowing when I’d see them again.
There is no place like “home home”
Back in the US, it’s been hard. job hunting in, once again, one of the toughest markets my generation has faced, relearning systems other countries make simple, and reckoning daily with what it means to be American. But I’m still hiking and watching sunsets, learning to solo camp, reconnecting with distant family, and building new friendships through local creative and rugby communities. I’m taking road trips across the West with my dog, opening my eyes to places that had felt so far away for so long.
It’s not the life I expected, and there’s still so much I don’t know. But when people ask why I moved back right now, I tell them the truth: I just knew I needed to be here, at least for now. And I know it was the right call, because despite everything, I’m somehow the happiest I’ve been in years.
