People often ask when I’ll go back to France, as if home were a place you return to once enough time has passed. As if distance naturally softens what came before. What they don’t see is the anxiety that rises in me at the thought — sudden, physical, disproportionate only if you don’t understand that some homes are also where the wound was formed. France is where I’m from. It’s also where I learned, very early, how to disappear.
There is a way people talk about home that assumes safety. Familiar streets. Shared language. A sense of belonging that waits patiently for you to come back. When that is your experience, leaving feels temporary. When it isn’t, leaving becomes something else entirely. France holds my roots — my language, my culture, the shape of my earliest memories. It is undeniably home. And yet, it was not a place that protected me.
Growing up, I learned what it meant to live without witness. Not through a single event, but through a pattern — of attention that went elsewhere, of pride that did not include me, of care that was conditional or absent. I existed in the margins of my own family. There was no moment dramatic enough to point to, no visible scar to explain what was missing. Just a steady, quiet erasure that teaches a child to shrink, to adapt, to survive by taking up as little space as possible.
This kind of childhood doesn’t announce itself. There is no language for it that others readily recognize. No catastrophe that justifies escape. And so when you leave, it doesn’t look like survival. It looks like choice. People assume you’re chasing opportunity, adventure, novelty. They don’t see that you are leaving because staying required too much disappearance. They don’t see that some departures happen not in defiance, but in self-preservation.
I’ve lived away from France for decades now — long enough that people frame it as distance, not exile. Exile is reserved for war, for famine, for undeniable danger. Mine doesn’t qualify. There was no external threat, no official reason I could point to and say, this is why I had to go. And yet, my body knows exactly why. It remembers what my mind sometimes tries to reason away.
When I think about returning, the response isn’t nostalgia. It’s anxiety — deep, immediate, and involuntary. Not fear of the place itself, but of what that place once demanded of me. The nervous system does not forget where it learned to stay alert, to brace, to disappear. That memory lives beneath language. It doesn’t ask permission from logic.
For a long time, I questioned that response. I wondered why something so beautiful could feel so unsafe. Why I couldn’t simply separate the country from the experience of growing up there. What I understand now is that anxiety isn’t always a signal to push through. Sometimes it’s a record. A form of intelligence that says: this is where you learned who you had to be to survive.
Over time, I’ve had to redefine what home is allowed to mean. Not as a place I must return to in order to be whole, but as something I am permitted to build. Home can be chosen. It can be quiet. It can be safe. Roots don’t require proximity. Belonging doesn’t demand reenactment.
France will always be where I’m from. That truth doesn’t disappear just because I left. But I no longer measure my loyalty by my willingness to return. Some homes don’t expel you. They simply teach you, slowly and repeatedly, how to leave.
There are parts of this story I no longer explain. Not because they aren’t real, but because they don’t need defending. I know what it cost me to survive where I came from.
I know what it took to build a life that fits.
And that knowledge is enough.