how do we find a place that feels like home?

Today, I read a quote that said something like, “If you feel discomfort in a place, then it’s not your place.” It triggered something deep within me.

I've lived in many different places—Germany, Paraguay, South Africa, Costa Rica, Austria. None of them felt like home. Some felt right temporarily, but I never truly belonged or could settle in.

Does that truly mean I just haven’t found the right place yet? Or maybe it means I haven’t accepted my actual home: myself.

I know it sounds cliché (& rightfully annoying), but hear me out;

I’ve always felt unsafe in my surroundings, even in places where I was physically safe. It’s how I’m conditioned, how my nervous system is wired, or rather, disregulated. Most of my childhood memories feel heavy and unsafe, primarily because I grew up in a rather unsafe place like South Africa, where crime is a normal part of life.

It’s like an old tape we used to have as kids, where you could record anything, and it would play over and over until you recorded something new. All those memories, thoughts, and fears from childhood are recorded in our body and mind. They follow us wherever we go until we record something over them.

This year has been my most challenging year emotionally. Everything that has accumulated over the years has caught up with me. It’s ironic because I was traveling for 2-3 years seeking freedom and lightheartedness, thinking it meant giving up my old life and home and starting completely new.

However on that rollercoaster journey, I realised all I have ever wanted is to feel peace, to feel home within. Constantly moving from one place to the next makes this desire impossible for me.

So, last year, I decided to move to a random place that felt good at the time of visit—a little town in Austria in the middle of the mountains. I believed that it would solve all my problems and worries. Little did I know what awaited me: anxiety, breakdowns, panic, constant distress, social withdrawal.

Growth is never linear; it’s a slow and unsteady process. When realising that instead of peace, I felt total stress, my first impulse was to move again and leave it all behind, to “find a home” somewhere else—a hopeless quest.

But even though Austria may never become my forever-place, I know I ended up here for a reason—to move through the darkness so I no longer search desperately for home in people, externalities, experiences. These are fleeting and beyond our control. What we can control is our decision to heal, to feel, to go through it.

Eventually, on the other side, we find freedom. More importantly, we find home—something precious and needed in a world and life characterised by uncertainty and worries.

Although I am terrified of this current journey of death and rebirth, a regular, repeating pattern crucial for growth and enlightenment, there is a hidden curiosity and excitement for what comes after, and how it feels to finally come home. It’s my soul, my higher self, a part of me buried deep below my ego. We all have our soul; it is there, waiting to be listened to. It doesn’t scream like your ego; it whispers until you turn your head, stop the tunnel vision, and let the darkness fill you until there is nothing left but light.

Welcome home.