The Country That Knows Me Too Well

Coming back can be more disorienting than leaving. There’s a particular kind of discomfort that has no clean name. It’s not homesickness. It’s not culture shock. It’s the feeling of landing back in a place that shaped you, where everyone knows the version of you that used to live here, and where almost nothing about your current life fits the furniture.

I’ve been back in my home country for ten days. After four years of moving, of living out of a 25-kilo pack, of building something that doesn’t have a fixed address, I’m here. Not for a visit. For some months.

The reasons are real. After being robbed in Bogotá last year, I had to take a hard look at what I was leaving exposed. Digital security, insurance gaps, the kind of administrative infrastructure that quietly requires a Dutch address and a proper registration. Sometimes the pragmatic choice and the painful choice are the same one. So here I am.

What the Body Already Knows

The frustration showed up before I’d even unpacked. Not loudly. More like a low-frequency hum that I recognize as resistance. It starts low in my torso, moves upward, and by the time it reaches my chest it feels like compression. My throat narrows slightly. My jaw sets.

This doesn’t feel like grief or anxiety. It feels like my body knowing I’m in the wrong place, even though my mind understands why I’m here.

What I notice is that I’m emotionally reactive in a way I haven’t been in a while. I’m picking fights with things that don’t deserve the energy. Little things land harder than they should. On my first day back, I was told, with the best of intentions, that the new car in the driveway wouldn’t be available for me to borrow. I hadn’t asked. I hadn’t even thought about it yet. But there it was, delivered as a preemptive boundary, and something in me pulled tight immediately.

I reacted. Too strongly, probably. Afterward, I sat with it. Not proud of how I’d handled it, and aware enough to see where my reaction had come from, but also not entirely sure I’d been wrong to feel what I felt.

That loop, reactivity followed by quiet reflection, is its own kind of exhaustion.

The Gap That Lives in the Living Room

There is a gap between my life and the lives of the people around me right now that is hard to overstate. I live from a backpack. One bag. Everything I own fits inside it. Over the years, this has become more than a practical choice. It’s become an ideology, one that grew slowly and that I’ve come to feel genuinely good about. The absence of things means the absence of the stress that comes with them. That said, I’d be lying if I said I never feel a flicker of something when I see what others have and I don’t. It’s there. I just don’t let it steer.

And then I’m here, surrounded by the full material weight of a Dutch boomer household, where protection is expressed through ownership and the cultural contract demands that we accumulate, insure, and secure.

I want to be fair about this. Because if I’m honest, I’m not exempt. I still feel the pull to protect what little I have left. I still weigh whether to share. I’d rather name that than pretend otherwise.

But the gap is real. And sitting inside it, for some months, without my own space, dependent on the goodwill of people who love me but whose nervous systems run on entirely different rhythms, this is the actual challenge. It’s not the country. It’s the friction of being between two lives simultaneously. And right now, I know very clearly which of those two worlds I belong in, and which one I’m just passing through.

The Station Incident

Yesterday I was waiting on a station platform in the province. A man and I made eye contact. It lasted a second too long, maybe. He was boarding the train, and just before the doors closed he turned and shouted at me: “What are you looking at, dude!” It was loud. The kind of aggression that comes not from confidence, but from feeling cornered by a glance.

I stood there, feeling the adrenaline flood my chest.

Was it because I am gay and something in my gaze registered as interest? Was it simply ambient aggression, the kind that exists in any public space? I do not know, and the fact that I cannot prove his motivation is exactly what makes it so unsettling. My own uncertainty is currently the filter through which I view the world. His anger felt less about me and more like fear dressed up as dominance.

My system went from neutral to activated in a heartbeat. I immediately felt that familiar pull to file this moment as evidence, part of a growing list that includes the car comment at home, the overfull supermarkets, and the tight social scripts of a place that feels increasingly alien.

I am primed to read this place as evidence that I don’t belong here. From the car comment at home to the stranger on the platform, I’m busy verifying a conclusion I’ve already reached, and I am aware enough to know that bias is doing part of the work.

It is a familiar, if exhausting, protective mechanism, one I have broken down before in Why Gay Nomads Keep Running, that keeps me scanning for danger even when the environment does not strictly demand it. Growing up gay has taught me to read rooms, to anticipate shifts in energy, and to prepare for a defensive stance before a threat is even visible. And here, in a country that knows me too well, that scanner is on high alert.

Finding My Way Back

The somatic piece is something I know how to work with, even when I don’t want to. When I feel that upward energy surge, the chest compression, the throat narrowing, I’ve learned not to argue with it intellectually. I move it instead.

What helps most right now is humming bee breath. I close my eyes, press my fingers gently over my ears, let my jaw go soft, and on the exhale I produce a low steady hum from somewhere in my throat. That’s it. No complicated setup. Within a few rounds, the hum seems to loosen something in my chest, like the vibration is doing the work my thoughts can’t. Something in my nervous system shifts. Not a cure. A recalibration.

When the room itself is too small, I leave. There’s a yoga studio nearby and getting myself there, into a class, into someone else’s instruction, into a room full of people who are also just trying to be in their bodies, is the closest thing I have right now to ecological sanity.

The goal for the next few months isn’t to enjoy this. It’s to move through it without causing damage. To the people who are hosting me with real generosity. To myself. And maybe, on the good days, to actually learn something from living this close to the contrast.

Returning somewhere familiar isn’t the opposite of displacement. Sometimes it’s just a different kind of it.

What Liminal Actually Costs

There’s a version of this story that’s tidy. The nomad comes home, reconnects, grows, leaves wiser. I’m not sure that’s what’s happening. What’s happening is messier. I’m irritable and self-aware enough to know I’m irritable, which makes it worse. I’m dependent on people I love and that dependency is landing in my body as something that feels uncomfortably close to exposure.

The between-state is real. I’m not the person who lived here four years ago. I’m not fully in the life I’ve built elsewhere. I’m in neither place, which means I have to be okay with being in the gap.

I catch myself staring at the half-unpacked bag in the room I am staying in at my parents’ place. It is a constant, visual reminder that I am just visiting my own life. What matters now is just staying in the gap without forcing it into a lesson.

And maybe I’m simply too close to it right now to zoom out and see the larger picture. It wouldn’t be the first time that a period which felt like friction in the living of it turned out, in hindsight, to have carried exactly the lessons I needed most. I’m working on staying open to that possibility. For now, I’m learning to be okay with simply being in the gap.

For now, I’m just staying in the gap.

Medical Disclaimer: This article reflects personal experiences and perspectives on emotional wellbeing, identity, and nervous system regulation. It is not intended as medical or psychological advice. If you are experiencing mental health concerns, please seek support from a qualified healthcare professional.