Sometimes You Have to Leave Home to Find Home

Sometimes You Have to Leave Home to Find Home

Because sometimes the clearest way to meet yourself is to stand somewhere new.

We often tell people: “You can’t run away from your problems.” And in truth, that’s fair. You can’t sidestep inner work simply by changing postcodes. But there’s a nuance we tend to miss: sometimes you have to alter the landscape to hear yourself more clearly.

Places carry a kind of psychographic imprint. Whether it’s the culture, the weight of familial expectations, other people’s projections, or simply the subtle energy of a location, these all become a form of noise. When amplified too high, they can drown out the quieter signals inside us.

Think of your everyday environment as a frequency. It doesn’t just hold your habits and routines. It carries the emotional residue of those around you, the collective beliefs of your community, even the stories embedded in the land itself. Over time, that frequency can begin to warp the channel. You become so entangled in the local signal that you forget what your own voice sounds like.

I’ve had two particular seasons where stepping away from the noise allowed me to hear the signal. It gave me enough stillness to begin the inner work required to grow into whoever it is I’m becoming.

The first was in Bath, England. I didn’t exactly choose Bath. At twenty-three, I didn’t know where I wanted to go to university, or if I even wanted to go at all. I certainly didn’t know what I wanted to study. But a friend had moved there a year earlier, and when I visited for a night out, the city left an imprint on me.

You might argue it was just familiarity. But that doesn’t quite hold. I’d been to Nottingham many times, to clubs like Rock City, and by that measure alone Nottingham would have easily topped the list. Yet it was Bath that kept returning to me.

Over the next year, I experienced the strangest pattern of synchronicities. The word Bath seemed amplified everywhere. I’d feel a faint hum in my chest whenever it appeared. I’d watch a programme on the BBC and suddenly they’d be in Bath, or speaking of it. These coincidences piled up until they hardly seemed like coincidences at all.

Now, I don’t believe some external force was directing me. More likely, Bath had always been there, woven through countless contexts. But during that season, my subconscious seemed to bring it forward as a kind of guidepost. We underestimate how profoundly our minds scan for patterns, how deftly they piece them together. Perhaps that’s what most of our cognitive machinery is doing: decoding the signal, feeding it back.

Whatever the mechanism, Bath called me. Not with palm trees or endless summers, but with cobbled streets and nine months of autumn each year. I went. I stayed for seven years. In that time I experienced what I can only call life-altering events — the people I met, the healing I underwent (both physical and emotional), the simple grace of being in the right places at precisely the right moments. Bath offered me a quiet backdrop against which I could begin to listen inward. To at least start the work. I also witnessed what some might call miracles there, though those are stories for another time.

I’ve come to believe Bath is an energetic node, carrying a frequency that resonated with me during that chapter. Until it didn’t. And that’s quite alright. Sometimes we learn what our soul needed to learn, and it becomes time to move on.

Returning to this idea of signal and noise: stepping out of one frequency — whether to another city or across an ocean — can be like turning the dial on a radio. Suddenly there’s less static. The inner nudges that were once muffled begin to break through. Sometimes that shift is all it takes to notice patterns you couldn’t see before.

Of course, travel isn’t magic. You still have to sit with yourself. Your shadows pack themselves into the same luggage. But in a new place, the familiar triggers might be absent, or at least softened. The old loops lose some of their grip. You get to explore who you are without the usual mirrors reflecting back who you’ve always been.

For the past five years, I’ve lived as a digital nomad. In truth, that means I’m effectively homeless — though I say that with a wry smile. This chapter has been transformative in other ways. I’ve learnt to sense the pull of certain places.

Some locations seem to hold a kind of medicine. A resonance. Like Chalong in Thailand for me — a rural part of Phuket, not especially close to a beach, yet where I’ve experienced profound healing, both physical and emotional. I’ve had the chance to learn about Eastern frameworks of health I might never have encountered in the West, simply because Southeast Asia holds a psychographic that embraces tension release and energy work as natural. Not fringe. Not pseudoscience.

You might not be able to articulate why standing barefoot on Thai soil feels like a gentle recalibration. Or why certain mountain towns feel like exhaling for the first time in years. But something in you knows. Often long before the mind catches up.

So no, travel isn’t always escapism. Sometimes it’s pilgrimage. A deliberate stepping away, so you can meet yourself somewhere new. And perhaps that’s the truest kind of inner work there is.