Originally Posted by destone

Politics, climate & nature, religion, gun violence, mental health, insane gap between haves and have nots.

Originally Posted by Pulaski

Please excuse me for taking your post slightly out of context. .... One of the best, most insightful pieces of advice that my mother has ever given me was "you can never go back". She said it in the context of her own life experience, moving from Hull to Sheffield, and then about 10 years later, to Gloucester, a city that she disliked, and was quite vocal about, at least among family at home. Although she was only talking about moving within the UK, the fact is that the place you left has "moved on", that the people you knew have also moved on, either their lives changing, getting married or having children, or changing jobs or interests, or also moving away. And so she came to realise (thanks to discussions with me ) that Gloucester was perhaps the best place to be, and that ripping up her roots and moving elsewhere, where at most she knew one or two people, wasn't the best idea. (I think my parents dodged a bullet anyway as they were considering a move to Norwich where my sister had "settled", but within a few years she had moved to the outskirts of London, then a couple of years later to France, and 7 years after that, to Pennsylvannia, which would likely have led to my parents being left "stranded" in Norwich. My sister did eventually return to the UK, but now lives in Cheshire, with plans to move to Devon, so living in Norwich wouldn't help our parents at all.)

And that applies equally if not more so for international moves. Even if you move back to the same place, the environment (people, services, politics, etc.) around may have changed so much that it might as well be somewhere you have never lived before. So the problem that afflicts many people (there are more than a few threads here on BE on the subject), is that they go "back" to the UK only to find that "back" isn't what they remember, and that the "back" that they remember probably doesn't even really exist except in their memory, so they re-emigrate back to where they emigrated to the first time.

And that ultimately can be one of the great curses of the expat - they don't really settle where they emigrate to, but they are equally unsettled if they return home. I think I fall into that situation myself - I am happy enough where I am now living (NC), and I am certainly not homesick, but I really don't "fit in" here either. I have a good life, with many good things, some of which I would never have had had I stayed in the UK, but no matter all that, I am still not "a regular American", and even after 20 years here, I never will be. But I also know that I could never go back to the UK and fit in there either. Every time I visit the UK the place feels more alien to me, so I already know that I could never be happy if I returned there to live. So here I am, a square-ish peg in a square hole, I don't quite fit here, but I certainly wouldn't fit in the UK either, and the only other alternative would be for me to go somewhere else, but that would likely be less of a fit than either NC or the UK.

So here I remain, life is good, and I am fairly happy. I am sure that my life is far better than for most people, and honeslty, I think that is good enough.