Moving home after 50 years: Thomas Ekvall

Moving home after 50 years in 11 different countries

It is a life that never settles. It stretches across borders, across decades, across versions of yourself that no longer recognise one another. From the outside, it can look like success: a career built and a materially good life assembled. From the inside, it can feel empty.

You are told you leave once. In reality, you keep leaving incrementally for the rest of your life.

At first, it is straightforward. You adapt. You learn how things are done. You observe, adjust, soften your edges. Over time, you become fluent in tone, gesture, and expectation, in what passes for normal. Work progresses, routines take hold, and social exchanges become convincing enough.

Then you return, not for good, just long enough to remind yourself where you began. But the place does not match the memory. The streets feel narrower and louder. Conversations move too quickly, circling references you do not understand. You notice it in others as well: a flicker of recognition, followed by something more uncertain. You are from here, but do not belong.

Language is the first fracture. Words you once carried effortlessly now feel slightly out of reach. Expressions have shifted; meanings have drifted. You hesitate where you never used to. The changes are small, but they accumulate until they form a considerable distance.

Meanwhile, your life elsewhere continues uninterrupted. You have learned your role. You know when to nod, when to laugh, how to project a version of ease that does not invite further scrutiny. Most days, it may even feel genuine.

Work helps. Structure helps. There is something peculiar about moving through systems that never fully align with you. You learn to carry that lightly, not because it is light, but because the alternative is worse.

And then there are the children. They belong in ways you never could; multicultural, multilingual, unburdened by the need to choose. They move between worlds with an ease you never mastered. They may be the strongest argument in favour of the life you built.

Regret does not arrive cleanly. It sits alongside pride and alongside the fact that life does not offer revisions. You do not regret what exists because of the choices you made. And yet, at times, there is the uneasy sense that something essential was exchanged without fully understanding the price.

It is a life lived in between. It resists a single, coherent narrative. It asks you to hold contradictions without resolving them. Some call that richness. Others call it loss. Most days, it is neither. It is simply the shape your life has taken.

You wake up, speak the language required, and move through the roles available. You build, as best you can, something that never quite roots.

And gradually, almost without noticing, you come to understand: you no longer belong anywhere.