finding home within
the only address you'll ever permanently live at is yourself
In your late twenties, you’ll meet a man who flies you to the city that unexplainably always felt like home. things won’t work out, but you’ll find yourself and all the peace and happiness you were searching for.
because home was never the city, it was you all along.
retrospectively, everything will make sense.
This essay took me five months and several trips back to New York to write.
I found it surprisingly difficult to distill eight years of constant movement into a single lesson, or to explain in a way that might resonate with anyone who has spent years searching for belonging.
here’s a song to listen to while you read: j’attends que la nuit
i have always felt timeboxed
I have lived in Singapore, New York, London, Zurich, Melbourne, Dubai/Saudi Arabia, and San Francisco. Over the years, I collected more stamps in my passport than furniture in my apartments.
I never craved permanence, and I rarely prioritized dating. Deep down, I knew I would eventually leave, and I hated the idea of having to say goodbye.
I still don’t have a good explanation for why I moved so often—more than ten times, if I’ve counted correctly.
I only know that I felt compelled to keep going, and that those years gave me extraordinary joy, profound grief, and ultimately the conviction to build the company I'm building today.
you are special
Last Christmas, my friend Nicki gave me a children's book called You Are Special by Max Lucado. It tells the story of Punchinello, a wooden Wemmick who believes he isn’t good enough because of what others say about him.
The story is simple, but devastating in its honesty: our worth does not fluctuate based on external validation.
Reading it forced me to confront how much of my adult life had quietly been shaped by the need to prove myself.
Somewhere along the way, I internalized the belief that love, success, and belonging had to be earned through performance.
the boy in new york
Around Christmas last year, my friend Lyndon commandeered my hinge account and matched me with a cute guy in New York.
After enough nudging, I booked a six-hour flight for a first date with someone I had only spoken to for a few days.
It sounds insane, but for someone who moves through airports as often as she moves through subway stations, it didn’t feel entirely unusual.
He planned a thoughtful dinner and bought tickets to see one of his favorite artists that night. I remember waiting for him in a vintage streetwear store, feeling the familiar anxiety and tension of first dates: the instinct to perform, to not get it wrong.
But something about him was disarming. He was calm, steady, and thoughtful in a way that softened the edges of my own nervous system. For someone who is constantly overfunctioning, that felt rare.
We stayed out until nearly three in the morning, talking at a concert about what we wanted from life. He seemed certain in a way I wasn’t. I wanted many of the same things, but I didn’t feel ready for them.
More honestly, I didn’t feel like I was enough.
Things didn’t work out, but I’ve always believed that some people enter your life briefly not to stay, but to teach you something. This felt like one of those moments.
cities & people as mirrors
For years, I believed I needed the right city, apartment, community, or structure to finally feel settled. It took me a long time to realize I was looking in the wrong direction.
When you spend enough time in a city, you stop feeling like a visitor. You learn which café knows your order, which corner catches the morning light, and which friend will pick you up from the airport. Without noticing it, you leave small versions of yourself behind.
I am fortunate in a way I’ve only recently understood. I can land in most major cities and call someone who knows me well.
These are people who knew me when I was broke, couch surfing, and bootstrapping my company. They supported me when I had very little to offer, and have seen every version of me I’ve since outgrown.
That isn’t the same as home. But it is evidence that something essential travels with me.
The parts of myself that resonate in each place were always mine. The cities were simply mirrors.
womanhood vs ambition
There is a cost to constant movement. For me, that cost was postponing love.
The people who carried me through every city, visa scare, burnout, and two-in-the-morning breakdown were my friends. They became the foundation upon which everything else was built.
For a long time, I believed that was enough. That friendship could serve as the primary architecture of a life, and romance could be a smaller wing built off the side. But the love I built with my friends is portable. The love I want next is not.
You can sustain friendships across six time zones. You cannot build a family that way. At some point, partnership asks you to stay.
My life has been optimized around performance. I wake up early, work out, eat clean, and light the same candles in every apartment so each place smelled faintly familiar.
I manufacture stability through discipline. But good routines cannot compensate for being estranged from yourself.
In New York, I remembered that I wanted a full life, not merely a successful one.
Family, community, faith, a home, hobbies, and a career I love, without sacrificing myself at the altar of ambition.
Somewhere along the way, I had come to believe that womanhood and ambition were in opposition. That success required the removal of softer desires.
But that was never true. Many women have built meaningful careers without abandoning their personal lives.
I had simply chosen movement over intimacy, and called it freedom. Over time, it became avoidance. I had been displaced from myself for so long that I mistook motion for meaning.
feeling ready
Someone who has the life I once wanted told me that you will never feel fully ready. There will never be a perfect time to move, fall in love, have children, or build a life. If you want those things, you have to pursue them.
I often tell myself that you can just do things. And the man in New York once told me that all of life is a squiggle.
Eventually, I stopped asking where I wanted to live. I began asking a different question: Who do I want to be when I get there?
Because home is not a place. It is not even a feeling.
Home is within you. It is the only place you will return to for the rest of your life.
The next chapter doesn’t start when I find the right city. It starts when I stop outsourcing the feeling of home to anything outside of myself.
Cities will change. People will come and go. Companies will be built and sold.
But I am the one constant. I am the only address I’ll ever permanently live at.
So here’s to the next version of myself who can juggle a great career, family, and a life full of adventure. Who carries home with her wherever she goes, because she finally knows where it lives.
To the boy who sparked this: thank you. I hope you find all the love and joy you’re searching for♥️