Home is other people

When we first moved to Portugal, I was pretty sure I was going to the middle of nowhere to escape the system and reconnect with myself. So far, so hero’s journey: me on a solo quest, slaying challenges, arriving at the personal epiphany. Such is the foundation story of many a middle-class British gap yah. (Ask me how I know.)

Quickly, I discovered that “nowhere” is a highly relative concept. And just in case I needed humbling any further, the heroes of my journey definitely weren’t me. They were the dozens of ordinary people who took time out of their own lives to guide me, patiently and good-humouredly, through the many basic (and not so basic) tasks I’d need to master to become a functioning part of the community. The lady who patiently helped me log my details on the system and get a fiscal number. The receptionist who helped me enrol at the health centre. The midwife who steered me through giving birth at home, and making sure my baby was actually registered as a human who existed at the end of it (yup, he got his own fiscal number).

Becoming an immigrant was an abrupt transition from being a competent, capable member of society to an ignorant, helpless and embarrassingly dependent one. There are so many things you don’t know, and so many more you don’t know you don’t know. At best, life feels like an exciting sequence of unexpected challenges and vocabulary tests. At worst, it’s a defeating, bewildering series of ever-higher walls between you and the basic life admin you meant to get done that day.

It’s impossible to do it alone. You might not be a group joiner. You might be like me: a solo-working introvert who had barely belonged to anything more taxing than the local library. Suddenly, you’re forced to join groups. Facebook groups. WhatsApp groups. Reddit threads. Informal get-togethers with other floundering foreigners with whom you often have nothing in common except that none of you knows how to survive here. Together you stitch a quilt of knowledge: where to do this, who to ask about that. You begin to rely on people. You pore over obscure three-year-old threads by people whose politics and life choices you may very well despise, detailing how they imported their car or got their children into school, and you are wholeheartedly, pathetically grateful.

It was as an immigrant that I first noticed the gaps in my community. I didn’t have a friend I could call in an emergency to watch my kids. So I began to consciously cultivate friendships where I’d do that for someone, and slowly came to know they’d do it for me. I started to value shared spaces where we could meet and feel we belonged, and I chose to show up in those places and help them grow. Not every space was right for me. But the ones that were needed everyone in them to tend them, not just enjoy them.

Once I’d seen this offline, I started noticing it in my work too. A group of self-employed people who met on a digital marketing course became some of my closest clients and friends; one of them later invited me to speak at a storytelling event in London. I watched a Facebook group of three thousand women become a business’s biggest champions, sharing advice, introductions and support far beyond anything its founders could have done alone. Again and again, whether in peer groups, friendships or learning spaces, we connect, we help each other, and we grow.

Being an immigrant showed me how much I took for granted the generational knowledge I held of how to function in my own country, and how much I needed to rely on other people once it was gone. And the thing is, as the world changes, all of us are becoming strangers. Whether it's AI, climate disasters, the rise of authoritarianism, or whatever next seismic societal shock is around the corner. All of us are operating in unfamiliar territory, facing tasks we don't know how to accomplish, feeling the complacency of knowing how it's always been done slip away like sand beneath our feet. As Ece Temelkuran explores to such devastating effect in Nation of Strangers, "...we need to redefine home in the twenty-first century if humanity doesn't want to become a handful of refugees on another planet... We know that home is, in fact, other people."

So I'm starting to focus on building new homes. On cultivating belonging, connection, reciprocity. And that's what I'm going to be writing more about here. Subscribe if you'd like to get updates when I do.