Belonging.

I arrived in London in 2020 as one person, and leave the city, albeit temporarily, a different woman entirely. This is my story of working out where, and with whom, I am meant to be.

I used to think home was in a person rather than a place. That no matter where in the world I was, as long as that person was nearby, I would feel at home. I don’t see it as that now. I see it more as that person was where I housed my memories for a time, built them into the bricks of who we were together, but that a person cannot represent home. As I move again, and temporarily to my hometown, I wonder if a sense of easy belonging will remain as elusive for me now as it was all those years ago, and be forever be just beyond my grasp.

For context, my hometown is a small one from where the first civil rights march set out in the north of Ireland in 1968. Wikipedia refers to it as an “IRA stronghold”, but really Wikipedia is a missing trick here, as the town is more known for its resistance not just to British rule, but to traffic regulation. In fact, when ordinary decent traffic wardens were first deployed in the area, they were threatened and forced to leave within 30 minutes, by people who were expressly- indignantly- not going to be told how to park in their own town. Read about it here, if it seems farfetched.

“Drive carefully - but damned if we will allow traffic wardens to tell you that”. Also, note the flag. We love flags, here.

All that said, and in case it doesn’t translate, I love my home and I love its people. I love their warped sense of humour that comes as standard, and I love the earnest cynicism with which they choose to see the world, as opposed to the malevolent kind encountered elsewhere. However, I know it is not where I am meant to be. I am forever a blend of not enough and too much, for life there. Not clannish enough, not sectarian enough, not interested enough in the local goings on, or reverent enough. And simultaneously too intense, likes big words too much (a criticism that has been landed on me in the past), too notion-y, too not down to earth.

I suspect many people in life have felt that yearning for a different circumstance, and many probably have done the reasonable thing of pursuing life, or further education if they go that route, somewhere else at an early age. If I had my time again, I would do that. But back when I was at that stage, going too far afield felt like a dream unrealisable. I had no connections anywhere other than Belfast, no foot in a door. I certainly didn’t have the moxie either, and London probably would have eaten that version of me up and spat it out; the city demands a tougher edge than I had then, to survive. There were other reasons identified in hindsight as to why I wasn’t quite ready to go. The realities of civil war are that you are kept small; nervous that another atrocity is just around the corner, accustomed and expectant that things will not all work out OK in the end. That way of living seeps into your psyche, or at least did mine. I also had lost my dad a few years prior and was still working out what life looked like after that.

And so on I went to build a good adult life, buying a house and getting married. I lived in a different, but in many ways similar, town. But it was not a life that fit me well. I contorted myself to fit it. I felt like a bystander, loitering in the wings of the real world where other people lived, waiting patiently for the part when my own would get good, but it never came. I was relentlessly cheerful, worked hard and made friends with ease, but inwardly I was weary, bored and lonely. Life had a rhythm, and I had people who loved me in so much as they knew how, but it did not feel congruent with what I really wanted for myself.

There are some moments in life that have a profound effect on you. One day working in a pharmacy, I was presented with two prescriptions, one for each of a married couple I knew. They were both ostensibly happy go lucky types. They had been to the doctor together, and been prescribed a matching set of antidepressants. The same dose, signed by the same doctor, on the same day. I felt sad for them both, and, selfishly, afraid that I was hurtling towards the same fate.

I’d love to be able to say that I made plans to exit that life after that, and deftly slipped off. I did not. I lost my way, which is a story for another day. But I refused to go back, and I moved to London.

My first few days here were the early days of the first lockdown lifting, when you could only see peoples’ eyes above their masks granting everyone a furtive, shifty demeanour. There was no traffic in the city, no hustle and bustle, and even central London felt peaceful and calm. I went for a run on the Old Brompton Road outside Harrods and chose to run right in the middle of the road, just because I could. Day by day the city was slowly unfurling back to life and I felt I was doing the exact same. Both it and I had been irrevocably changed by what had gone on in the months prior, and we both were ready to thrive again.

But oddly , I didn’t feel misplaced here in London. The streets didn’t feel like solely mine, like but they felt as much mine as anyone else’s. I felt like an equal shareholder of these public spaces and parks. At home, I had felt like an ignoramus compared to those whose local knowledge was both intimate and encyclopaedic. I felt like an intruder in their homeland, rather than living in my own. But not in London. In London my sense of belonging was no greater or less than anyone else's.

My rent, though hefty, was worth every penny. It was a sum I was happy to pay for my newfound freedom. It was the price of becoming the woman I always wanted to be. It is both freeing and unbinding, to live entirely on your own in a city this size. It has granted me an anonymity that is impossible in a smaller town, or even city.

In the intervening years I have learned that the security that most people seem to crave - jobs, mortgages, children, pets and plants - to me, feels like chains. I’m proud of my professional work, and it means a lot to me, but I don’t care for titles or status. Uncertainty isn’t what I desire either, but, for short term, it is a fair exchange for the life that I have. I am free, and can throw myself into something new anytime, anywhere I choose (that budget allows, obvs). As for that sense of belonging - it is not possible to find it within a person, but perhaps it is with people. It is the people who have done life, and continue to do it, on their own terms, that I am lucky to meet along my way, that make me feel at home - wherever I go.

Some people I have met have said that I am brave for having moved later in life. I don’t see it that way. I see that I was cowardly for not having left earlier. When it came to it, the greatest fear was of waking up aged 80 and thinking - was that it? Was that all there was to my life? Which is much more scary, really.

So if you’re reading this wondering if you are where you are really meant to be, in my experience that little nagging voice telling you the truth, whatever it is, rarely goes away. It just gets louder, maybe becomes a desperate cry, and denying it is a sure path to regret. I won’t tell you that the grass is greener, but at least it is your grass, and no one else’s.

Higham House West, my first London flat, has been excellent in all of the ways imaginable. Wherever I wash up next (hopefully as a London homeowner, touching all the wood and even resorting to prayer) the bar has been set high.

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Back to frivolities on Wednesday

Until then

Big love

Una

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