Searching for a place to call home

A feeling of unreality

London has come closest to satisfying my need to experience difference in my day-to-day life, but six years ago the urge pushed me even further, to chaotic and beguiling Bangkok. My first few weeks in Thailand felt exciting and fresh, but a month after arriving I discovered I needed an operation under general anaesthetic.

The process of diagnosis was traumatic (it involved being told in broken English I had a “large lump” beside my ovary), and then I faced my first-ever hospital stay thousands of miles from most of my friends and family.

I initially made a quick recovery. But a couple of months later something seemed to malfunction. I felt disoriented, as if I was floating outside of my body or seeing everything through a pane of glass. I would experience numbness down one side of my face. My energy would crash. I would walk the streets of Bangkok but feel like I wasn’t really there.

I didn’t feel ‘normal’ again until I’d taken an extended holiday back in the UK. Being in a place I understood, around people I had long-standing connections with, somehow allowed me to recalibrate.

But when I moved back to the UK for good after four years in Thailand, I experienced the same disorientation I’d felt when I’d first emigrated. Facial numbness, the extreme lethargy, the feeling of disconnection and unreality plagued me on and off for months once I was back in London.

The science of place and person

Studying the relationship between person and place has helped me make sense of my experience of emigrating. Place isn’t simply a static collection of physical features. According to the People, Place and Space Reader, “the environment informs human knowledge, and human experiences shape the way by which the environment is known”.

The geographer Doreen Massey goes further. In reference to globalisation and technological advances, she writes that places should be “imagined as articulated moments in networks of social relations and understandings”.

I had naively relocated to a new place and expected it to become ‘home’. But the experiences I had in Bangkok were initially frightening and negative. For it to be home I had to have a sense of its networks and my place within them. Instead I’d arrived and been catapulted straight into its health system alone.

In ‘Invisible Cities’ Italo Calvino writes, “Arriving at each new city, the traveller finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.”

I underestimated what it means to sever the connections with familiar places and people and strike out anew. And then, when I returned to London a few years later, my “social relations and understandings” had moved on again. I became locked in another struggle with disconnection. I was so tired and spent, and I felt like a different person, having become a mother while I was away.

The solace of the natural world

In a report stressing the power of nature to integrate immigrants and people of colour who feel marginalised in British society, the Black Environment Network places emphasis on the power of natural features to provide continuity between ‘home’ and an alien environment: “…this continuity enables an emotional homecoming,” it says.

“Grass can always be recognised as grass, trees are trees, no matter how different. Greenness puts us in touch with a vibrant sense of growing things, and of being cradled by the earth.”

Which leads me back to Grandma, and how, in the places she felt at peace, I feel at peace. She was the kindling that lit up my love of wildlife. In doing that, she’s given me the ability to find solace when I’m navigating unfamiliar territory. Even if it couldn’t heal the disconnection I felt in Thailand, nature did provide snatches of comfort, like when bulbuls nested on our balcony and I was so taken with them, they almost felt like family.

And later, when the coronavirus pandemic struck and there were days when I woke up with a blackness in me, I’d go out onto the concrete porch of my London flat, see the first of my daffodil bulbs poking through in the raised bed, and smile.

“Dear Tanya,” Grandma has written on a slip of paper tucked into a copy of Roger Deakin’s ‘Notes from Walnut Tree Farm’. “This is the kind of book one can pick up at any time – for even a few moments – and feel part of the world in which we live.”

She’s marked a passage on page 137: “Grandpa Wood – cracking open the coal to show me fossil ferns, the concealed history of the carboniferous forest. Trees make time stand still.”

Wherever I go in the world, there will always be trees. I can go to them, and cheat time by being with Grandma again. Each encounter a homecoming.