13 October 2026 · By Thiago Pires

Why going home for a visit feels strange

On the odd feeling of being a guest in your own past

You count the days. You plan the food you will eat, the people you will see, the streets you will walk. And then you land, and somewhere between the airport and your parents’ kitchen something feels slightly off. Nothing is wrong. Everyone is happy to see you. You are happy to see them. And still you feel like you are wearing a coat that used to fit.

This is one of the most common experiences of people who live abroad and one of the least talked about, because it seems ungrateful. How can you feel strange at home?

Think of an old photograph of yourself. You recognise the face, the clothes, the place. But you cannot fully step back into the picture, because the person looking at it is not the person in it. Going home is a little like trying to walk into that photograph. The place kept its shape in your memory. You did not.

And here is the part we often forget: home did not stay still either. While you were away, your friends had their own years. Your city changed shops, prices, slang. Your family adjusted its routines to your absence, and that adjustment was necessary, and it can still hurt to see it. The chair that was yours is now where the dog sleeps. The group chat has jokes you don’t understand. Nobody did anything wrong. Life simply continued, as it does.

Phenomenology has a useful word for this: the homeworld. It is not a place on a map. It is the world we inhabit without thinking, the one that feels obvious. When you live abroad long enough, your homeworld does not disappear. It splits. Part of it stays there, part of it grows where you live now, and when you visit, you feel the seam.

That seam shows up in very concrete ways:

• You notice things that used to be invisible: the noise, the hugs, the way people interrupt, the way they don’t.
• You find yourself defending your new country, then defending your old one, depending on who is talking.
• People ask “how is it there?” and want a short answer to something that took years.
• You have less patience than you expected, and then feel guilty about it.
• You leave relieved, and then miss everyone on the plane.

None of this means you no longer belong. It means you belong in more than one way now, and no single place holds all of you. That can feel like loss. It can also, with time, feel like a kind of width.

What tends to help is not forcing the visit to be perfect. Some suggestions, offered as questions rather than rules:

• What are you hoping to find at home that may no longer be there in the same form?
• Who do you need to see, and who do you feel obliged to see? Are those the same list?
• Is there someone with whom you can talk about the strangeness itself, instead of pretending it isn’t there?
• What did you bring back, inside you, from the life you have now?

Feeling strange at home is not a sign that you made the wrong choice by leaving, or that you should go back. It is a sign that you have lived something real. The discomfort is the shape of that experience.

If returning home, or the feeling of not quite fitting anywhere, is something you would like to understand better, I work online with people living abroad, in Portuguese, English, Spanish and French.