Home

Sometimes it’s hard coming home.

Not because I don’t love the people here. I do. Deeply. These are the streets that raised me, the people who held pieces of my story long before I knew where my life would lead. 

But something in me no longer quite fits the life I once knew. It’s as though I’ve stepped back into a world that kept moving while I was away, yet I returned somehow altered. 

The scenery is familiar, the same houses, the same people, the same conversations, but I walk through it feeling slightly out of step, like someone who knows the choreography but can no longer quite hear the same music.

Everything is recognizable, yet I feel like a quiet observer standing just slightly outside of it all.

It feels like I’m speaking a different language now. The words are the same, but the meaning feels different. Conversations drift easily toward renovations, new kitchens, backyard pools, mortgages and babies the gentle milestones of a life that is steady and predictable. I listen and smile. I nod in the right places. I ask questions the way you’re meant to. But somewhere inside me there’s a quiet distance I can’t quite explain.

Because my days have been filled with a different reality.

A reality where oxygen sometimes runs out.

Where mothers sit at bedsides whispering prayers into the darkness, hoping their child will still be breathing in the morning.

Where life and death can hinge on something as simple as whether you have access to a bag of IV fluids or a lifesaving medication.

Where the smallest victories carry the weight of miracles, when a child finally sits up after days of fighting to breathe, when a nurse learns something new that might save the next patient, when laughter breaks out in a ward that has seen far too many tears.

When you live inside that world long enough, it quietly rearranges you.

The scale of things shifts.

What feels urgent changes.
What feels important reshapes itself deep within your bones.

You start to measure joy differently.

You start to notice the fragility of life in places you once took for granted.

You begin to understand how thin the line between survival and loss can really be.

So when I sit in conversations about tiles and landscaping and nursery colours, part of me struggles to find my place within them. Not because those things are wrong, they aren’t. They are beautiful in their own way. They represent safety, stability, the kind of life many people work hard to build and deserve to enjoy. There is goodness in that kind of ordinary peace.

But after witnessing so much fragility, it can feel strange to step back into a world where those are the biggest worries.

Sometimes I feel like I’ve carried another world home with me, tucked quietly behind my ribs. A world full of faces and names and stories that no one else in the room has met. Children whose laughter still echoes in my memory. Mothers whose tears I can still picture. Nurses who keep showing up every day despite impossible odds.

Those stories live in me now.

And they don’t always translate easily into casual conversation over coffee.

How do you explain the weight of that to someone who hasn’t stood in those wards?

How do you speak about life and death in a room where the mood is light and easy?

How do you honour both worlds without making either one feel diminished?

So I often sit quietly between them.

Between the life that raised me and the life that reshaped me.

Between the comfort of home and the reality that changed my understanding of the world.

Trying to remember how to belong to both.

Learning, slowly, that perhaps I don’t have to choose one or the other.

Perhaps my place now is in the space between, carrying both worlds within me,
letting each one teach me how to see the other more clearly