There are places in this world that feel like home for a moment, but never quite fully.
Belonging is one of those things everyone assumes you eventually figure out — like taxes or how to fold a fitted sheet. But for some of us, belonging is slippery. It changes shape depending on where we stand. When I returned to the UK, a place that once felt like the beginning of my adult life, I found myself asking the same questions I’ve asked for years: Where do I belong? Do I belong anywhere?
Some days I feel like I’m piecing myself together from all the places I’ve lived — a patchwork of accents, habits, and memories that don’t always make sense together.
After years of wandering (and wondering), I realized that belonging isn’t always tied to geography.
Sometimes it’s tied to memory, identity, or the person we once were.
The Immigrant’s Split Identity
There’s a strange loneliness that comes with being an immigrant– a feeling that you exist in two worlds but fully belong to neither.
I’ve always had a hint of identity crisis, even before I knew what to call it. Growing up in the Philippines, I didn’t fully fit in. I openly rejected certain traditional beliefs. I advocated for reproductive rights in a deeply Catholic environment. I criticized the manipulative “breadwinner” culture disguised as familial devotion. And I became agnostic after college (much to the horror of my more religious friends).
When I moved to the UK, I thought assimilation would be easy. I spoke English fluently (though my accent became a constant point of curiosity). I learned to love tea and tolerate beans-for-breakfast. I adapted to British work culture — even if I silently questioned why a 12-hour shift needed two tea breaks, a breakfast break, and lunch, and a smoke break.
Then I moved to America. I adapted again — this time to their hustle culture, which promptly led me to early burnout. I learned to drive, changed my accent, picked up their slang, celebrated their holidays.
But beneath all these surface-level adaptations were deeper wounds.
Racism, for one. I still haven’t forgiven myself for staying silent during moments of microaggressions from colleagues abroad or even from patients here in the States. I remind myself I was young and it was my first time stepping outside the safety of Filipino society, but a part of me still wishes I had been braver.
Another shift happened quietly: my mindset changed. Beliefs I once lived by no longer fit. The Filipino cultural value of meekness in the name of camaraderie, I now disdain. I’ve become bolder, more assertive– even blunt when needed– and I found it liberating. Choosing myself — considered selfish back home — is praised here.
So now I float between worlds.
In the Philippines, I often felt “too Western,” shaped by the independence and mindset I gained abroad. But outside the Philippines, I’m unmistakably Filipino — in my values, my humor, my softness, my way of navigating the world.
It’s a tension that’s hard to explain: you adapt so well that you lose pieces of home, yet you still carry enough of home that you never fully blend in.
That’s the cost of assimilation: language shifts, accent shifts, habits changing.
Even though I still speak Tagalog fluently, I sometimes struggle to express my deepest thoughts in it. Some ideas come out more naturally in English — sometimes even in Italian or Spanish.
I’ve changed so much that I don’t fit the place I came from, and yet I’m still “othered” in the places I move to.
The Quiet Loneliness of Being In-between
Finding genuine relationships becomes difficult when you live in cultural limbo. It’s like trying to sift instant coffee — impossible to separate what dissolves together.
Or like being stuck in a Venn diagram:
One circle overlaps with immigrants who share your cultural roots. Another overlaps with locals who share your newly wired brain. But you never fully belong in either, because you’re too much of this and not enough of that.
Years after leaving Manila, I realized I don’t have a single “home”, only versions of it.
Manila is no longer the Manila I grew up in. I don’t understand the local culture anymore.
My UK friendships have evolved without me; re-entering feels like trespassing.
And the U.S. feels more like an office — functional, practical, and emotionally sterile.
Eventually, belonging becomes something internal rather than external.
The Immigrant’s Truth: Belonging Is an Inside Job
There comes a point in the immigrant journey when you understand that belonging isn’t tied to a flag, a language, or a postal code. It’s tied to who you’re becoming.
I don’t fully belong to the Philippines anymore, but I don’t fully belong anywhere else either.
It feels bleak sometimes, like living in a constant kind of purgatory.
And yet, in this in-between space, I’ve also found freedom.
I learned not to conform to any singular culture’s expectations– after all, I’m not enough of this and I’m too much of that. I can be whoever I want in any given moment, a cultural chameleon, if you may.
Being “too Filipino for the West and too Western for Filipinos” stops feeling like a flaw and starts feeling like a quiet kind of power—proof that I carry multiple worlds inside me, and I don’t have to choose just one. I belong not to the past I left behind, nor to the expectations others place on me, but to the person that I am still growing into.
Returning to the UK: A Mirror, Not a Home
Returning to the UK felt like walking into an old photograph — familiar outlines, familiar colors, but with a version of myself missing from the frame.
London’s trains, the accents, the cold air outside Heathrow… all of it tugged at memories I didn’t realize I still held. But as I wandered through Eastbourne, passing by old haunts and seeing familiar sights that didn’t feel familiar anymore, I felt the sting of distance.
Friends had moved forward — marriages, babies, new careers — and I wasn’t part of those chapters anymore.
It’s hard not to feel marooned. Here I was, planning solo trips because my friends live oceans away, celebrating milestones alone, building a life that no longer mirrors anyone else’s.
I realize the ache wasn’t about the place changing. It was more about me changing. While the places and the people changed, the truth is that I didn’t lose that home. I simply outgrew the version of myself who lived there.
The Inner Work of Starting Over
Starting over isn’t a single moment—it’s a lifelong unraveling and reweaving of who you are.
Every place I’ve lived left its fingerprints on me: the Philippines shaped my roots, the UK nudged me into adulthood, Houston taught me survival, and my travels taught me courage.
Reinvention stops being dramatic and becomes something quiet, subtle, continuous. And along the way, I realize that identity isn’t linear. It’s layered, contradictory, sometimes fragmented, sometimes whole.
Belonging stops being about choosing one place and instead becomes about making room for them all: every city, every version of myself, coexisting in the same heart.
I can belong anywhere, everywhere, and nowhere, as long as I remain true to myself.
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