Neither Here Nor There: Where Is Home?
Searching for home in fleeting moments rather than fixed places.
This is part 6 of my 7-part essay series, Neither Here Nor There: Loneliness, Belonging & Othering. You can read the series introduction here.
For some, home is a single point on the map, a rootedness that anchors every other part of life. For me, and for many Third Culture Kids, home has always been less a destination than a fleeting moment: a rhythm of light, a cadence of words, a sense of belonging that appears and then dissolves.
Home, for some, is a fixed place. For others, it's people, or even language. For TCKs who create, home can be a moment—a particular quality of light, a rhythm of words, a way of seeing, that feels like memory. But it's rarely permanent, and that impermanence shapes everything we make.
Marilyn Gardner once asked: "If home is where our story begins, what happens when we cannot go back?"⁸ For the artist, that question becomes: what happens when we learn to make home out of the very act of not belonging?
That's the thing; home, for us, is often fleeting—a pause, not a destination. And with that impermanence comes a kind of quiet grief, but also a particular way of seeing: heightened awareness, deeper attention to detail, the ability to find significance in transitory moments. We learn to love things knowing we'll lose them, and that knowledge infuses our work with both urgency and tenderness.
Paradoxically, that same impermanence is what draws me to travel and to making art about travel. I love the act of travelling—the rhythm of trains and footsteps, the unfolding of new geographies, the heightened awareness that comes with being in motion. I love arriving too: the slow process of getting to know a place, of learning its contours, its people, its silences. These are the moments when I feel most awake as an artist, when the combination of movement and observation creates optimal conditions for seeing.
Perhaps it's because, when I travel, I am clearly and openly other—and I've learned to work with otherness rather than against it. In many of the places I've visited, that otherness has been met not with suspicion or dismissal, but with curiosity—often welcome. It's a kind of acknowledgment I rarely find in the place I live, where my difference is harder to name and so often goes unseen.
Abroad, my otherness is visible, expected, even interesting. And in that visibility, I feel more real as both person and artist; more known, more able to do the work that requires the distance of the outsider. The creative life, I've learned, requires a certain amount of homelessness—not as a tragedy, but as a tool.
Perhaps this impermanence is why I travel, and why I create. To be always in motion is to be always awake, alert, alive to possibility. When you think of “home,” what comes to mind first—a place, a person, a language, or something else entirely?
In the final part of this series, I’ll share how I have learned to find peace in the in-between—turning solitude into sustenance, and offering connection through the act of creating.
Next instalment: Finding Peace in Between.
⁸ Marilyn Gardner is a writer, public health nurse, and adult Third Culture Kid, author of Between Worlds: Essays on Culture and Belonging and Worlds Apart: A Third Culture Kid's Journey.