"For more and more of us, home has less to do with a piece of soil than a piece of soul.”
- Pico Iyer
What does it mean to feel at home in yourself?
I didn't know how to answer that question until I arrived somewhere that made me feel like a stranger — not to the place, but to myself.
That place was Santiago, Chile. But to understand why it nearly closed me, you have to know what came before it.
The Pull
Long before I knew why, I felt a pull. I remember flipping through my World Atlas in the quiet moments of childhood boredom, thumbing past pages of ancient cultures.
Sitting at the family computer, I would map out the train routes through European cities I had never seen, already imagining myself adventuring as a solo globetrotter.
I carried that pull into my twenties the way you carry the key to an old house when you've forgotten which door it opens. Lost in the junk drawer of competing demands of an adult life that called me to be a "productive member of society", it lay dormant.
The Plan
I grew up with a plan handed to me fully formed, the way a recipe gets passed down generation to generation. Graduate high school. Graduate college. Get a master's. Get married. Have children. Work, save, and spend two weeks a year on vacation. And at some future date, you're deserving of rest in retirement.
Some people believe in that sequence like their life depends on it, and for a long time, so did I, even as some quieter part of me kept building a case against it.
The problem was that I had never seen anyone do it differently.
The Push
Then the job ended. We've all lived our own version of this moment that shoved us out of our comfort zone into the unknown.
But in the wake of what should have been a devastating outcome, I was handed a gift. My former boss wrote me a personal check for ten thousand dollars with a subtext that seemed to say, go follow your dreams.
I invested in two things so I could pursue my solo travel dreams: a laptop and a yoga teacher training. The laptop gave me external freedom — a way to work from anywhere. The yoga training gave me the starting path toward internal freedom.
Joseph Campbell wrote, "We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.” Standing there with that check in my hand, I felt it. This was the moment to let go.
Cracked Open
When I left on what was supposed to be 1 year of solo travel as a digital nomad, my first stop was Medellín, and I arrived with no map for what I was walking into.
Medellín felt wild, like being on the back of a motorcycle. The city whips past you in bursts of energy, as you weave through the crowded crevices of traffic. You're not in control of any of it. Greenery grows out of every crevice and there's always a strong salsa rhythm coming from somewhere. Art and graffiti cover every surface, murals bleeding into murals. Even the sidewalks are raised a little higher off the street than you'd expect, like the city built its own bumpers to contain what couldn't otherwise be contained.
I was scared in every moment. And I was in love with the fear of the unknown around every corner.
That feeling became a compass.
The plan in my head went quiet. Something had opened in me that I didn't want to close back up. For two years I traveled all over Latin America and Europe, discovering the world and myself at the same time, with an open surrender I first learned in Medellín.
Home Is Where The Heart Is
Over time, I kept coming back to Medellín, and each time I stayed a little longer enjoying the peace it brought me.
That's where I met my husband.
Being with him felt like being on the back of that motorcycle — risky and wild and unknown, and I trusted it. His joy exuded through the way he moved through a room, how he danced without needing an occasion, the way he sang with utter spontaneity.
I wasn't only saying yes to him. I was saying yes to this fearless expressiveness living in my own soul.
The Crossroads
Then, his company then offered him a position in Chile. I wanted him to feel the same expansion I'd been living inside for years, so we said yes before I had set foot in the country.
When we visited, my heart dropped from my chest into my stomach.
Where Medellín had met me with noise and warmth, Santiago felt closed in a way I didn't understand yet. More private and reserved. Less inclined to let a stranger in. I felt the contrast in my body before I could name what I was experiencing.
And I noticed something else: resistance. The urge to catalogue every cultural difference as proof of a mistake, to use my discomfort as a verdict on the place rather than as information about myself.
I'd spent years learning to trust what my body told me. But in Santiago, what my body was telling me was to close. And I had to choose whether to listen to that signal or turn toward it with curiosity.
I turned toward it.
Curiosity didn't fix everything. Challenges still came and went. But curiosity towards discomfort opened a door — to myself and to the place I was standing in — and through that door I found something I hadn't expected: another sense of home. Not the kind that finds you immediately, but the kind you build with your own hands, slowly, and on purpose.
Home Is What You Build Inside Yourself
This is what I do now. I work with expats and digital nomads at exactly the moment when the dream and the reality are learning to share the same space. When the freedom you worked for feels lonelier than you expected. Or when the life you designed somehow doesn't fit the way you thought it would.
Not because discomfort means there is something wrong.
Because growth doesn't feel like arrival; it feels like standing on the edge of something, looking down into the abyss of the unknown. Adam Grant writes that when discomfort is a signal of progress, you don't want to run from it. You want to keep stumbling toward it.
I know what it costs to choose a life abroad. I know what it makes possible. And I know what it feels like when the ground shifts under you and you feel like you've lost yourself somewhere along the way.
What does it mean to feel at home in yourself?
It means having a relationship with your own discomfort steady enough that a new place can't take the ground out from under you. It doesn't mean loving all the hard parts of living abroad. It means being able to stay present inside them long enough to find out what they're actually telling you.
And it's the conversation I'm here to have with you.