Earlier this year, on a rainy July day, I submitted a non-fiction piece based on the theme "Home Is Elsewhere" into a competition. Unfortunately it didn't pick up anything, but that means I can give it the light of day here! It's a poignant, reflective piece about what it feels like living in another European country as a British expat since the UK voted for Brexit.
It's also a bit of an ode to Germany, the country I now call home – and as they're holding a rather important national election this weekend perhaps the timing couldn't be more perfect.
We all have somewhere we call home. Right?
It's somewhere to belong, to live and grow; somewhere to hide when the world is too much. Somewhere to go back to.
But when home isn't home anymore, where is home?
Having lived the expat life for the past five years, it's a question I've found myself asking more and more the longer and further I've lived away from "home". Home used to be somewhere safe to return to, a place of comfort and memories. Now my sense of home is falling apart. A derelict notion.
Home was a place my parents lived. A house I grew up in. A village of friends and enemies. Wide open fields in the heart of the English countryside, splattered with houses of all shapes and sizes.
Now, I don't know how to drive home. Home is misplaced. It is a shadow, an echo of what it once was. A memory bundled with many others. Home has many faces now.
As a thirtysomething expat, it is my apartment in the heart of a growing city. It is where my Wi-Fi connects as I enter and my Netflix is already logged in. Home is where I sleep at night after long days at the office. But home is also that place I grew up. A country, a county, a village far away. A place someone else calls home now. That home is now boxes full of memories – forgotten in my parents' new garage – that my past self once believed I would still care about 20 years later.
That home is a place I belong. But it is also a place I don't belong anymore. It's a place I've outgrown. It's a place that's changed. It's a place that no longer exists.
I've heard people say that there comes a time when home no longer exists in the form you once knew it to. I'd always expected this to be a gradual change. That, as the years passed, slowly "home" in its first form would evaporate, replaced by the home I would create with my lover, my significant other, my own family. I never imagined that I would be able to pinpoint the moment home, as I knew it, would stop being home.
The day it happened, I woke up early with a taxi to order and a flight to catch. My phone's alarm trilled into action. Subconsciously I reached for it from my bed. Alarm disarmed, I checked the news. The previous day had been an important one in my homeland and I was equally eager and full of dread to find out the outcome. That morning, June 24th 2016, was the day the home I had once loved, once fiercely identified with, ceased to exist.
It was the day the world discovered that 52% of the UK's voting population wanted out of the European Union. Within 24 hours my homeland had gone from being kingdoms united to lands falling apart at the seams. But to be honest, the irrevocable changes had been well on their way for months, maybe even years. Thinly veiled xenophobia had littered the front pages of major tabloids and political campaigns had been bolstered on half-truths and vaguities that could be all too easily misinterpreted.
Picking up my passport emblazoned with the words "European Union United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" that morning carried an unexpected smack of sadness and regret. I thought that would be the worst of it. It wasn't. As the consequences of the previous day's events unfolded and the lurid abuse set in, the England I had so lovingly left behind in March 2012 no longer existed. I watched from afar, my heart breaking, as my homeland imploded on itself. I hoped it would be short lived. That we would pick ourselves up and recover, figure out how to make the best of a bad situation and shoulder on as we Brits do. But now, a little over a year on, I know that, should I ever return to the country of my birth, going "home" to live there again will never be the same.
In the 12 months that have passed since that day I've experienced emotions that I can only compare to bereavement. I know that sounds dramatic. But in truth I've felt so lost and displaced since that day. The country I had once spilled over in patriotism for is not there anymore. Long gone are the days of bursting with national pride – days like my very first expat summer, watching as the country of my birth hosted the world's greatest sporting event and homegrown athletes won gold and silver and bronze.
Five years later, in its place stands a divided, hostile territory. England has become a land where people are yelled at in the street and told to go "home" – nevermind that they hold British citizenship and have spent their entire lives living on those shores. Brexit opened the gates to a wave of hatred no one really wanted to believe was there before.
As a removed Brit all I can do is watch and listen in horror as news reports and friends back "home" – British nationals and foreign expats alike – share stories that break my heart. Our government in a mess, our economy nose-diving, our people turning on each other. My friends facing uncertain futures where once everything seemed so clear. My own future hinging on my ability to master a foreign language and the generosity of another nation. And there's nothing I can do. I'm powerless to prevent it. To protect the home I had once loved. To protect my friends and family. I can no longer feel proud of that place I once called home.
And as I lost my sense of home, I found myself displaced – lost; confused; my identity as a Brit thrown into question. I no longer want to be associated with a nation so full of hatred and xenophobia; a nation that has let such venom towards people rise to the surface. I cannot tolerate it.
In just 24 hours home came to be not home anymore.
Over a year on, I still find myself occasionally apologising to European friends – both in the UK and Germany, where I live now – for the way in which the people of my homeland acted and continue to scapegoat EU immigrants as if it was all their fault. I apologise because in the five years I've lived in Germany, the country has offered me so much.
Germany has truly made me feel at home – after decades of muddling through life, school, university, and early adulthood not sure about my fit in the world, my first year in Germany was one that was full of feeling like this was it, I had finally found my place, finally found the right hole for this odd-shaped peg. Here, at last, was somewhere to belong. Here was my home. And to think, I might never have found it!
But now with Brexit negotiations in full swing, I face the possibility I could lose the country that has offered me a home seemingly unconditionally. Brexit means I could lose the home I've found – the home that, somehow, chose me. With arguments raging about the rights of EU citizens in the UK and UK citizens in EU nations, no one really knows how this will end. No one knows what will happen to any of us European expats, regardless of the passports we hold and the countries we call home right now. The next two years hold questions no one can answer.
Add this uncertainty to the distress of seeing your homeland reveal its true colours of animosity and it's no wonder I've spent much of the last year grieving the loss of home and national pride, and feeling displaced. Things that were once sure, that once made me proud, that would always be there, have been erased.
Home is no longer a place, no longer something tangible. It's no longer somewhere from my past I can return to for comfort and security. Home is a sense. A notion I once created for myself, and am now forced to recreate and re-find.
Home is something else, somewhere else.
I hope I find it soon.