Eight Months Nomadic and You Want to Go Home but Can't Say So

The thing you're calling a decision

The coworking space has about twelve regulars and you know all their laptop stickers. Someone asked you this morning how long you're here for. You've answered that question maybe forty times since March, and in the same period you have not had one conversation that got past the second layer of anything.

You want to go home.

You also know exactly what going home looks like from the outside, because you announced this. There was a post. There were people at your leaving drinks. There was an aunt who said, in that particular voice, well, good for you.

So instead of booking the flight home you're looking at somewhere new for October, and the thing you're calling a decision is a way of postponing one.

The advice written for this moment is written for a tired person. Slow down, do less, try slow travel, practise self-care. You're not tired. You're structurally isolated, and rest doesn't fix a structure.

Why the loneliness isn't a personality problem

Friendship is not made out of good conversations. It's made out of repetition — enough of it that you stop reintroducing yourself, can pick up last week's thread, and have a small shared history to make jokes out of.

On a thirty-day cycle you never get that many repetitions.

Worse, everyone you meet is on the same clock and you both know it, so neither of you invests. That's not coldness. It's a reasonable allocation of effort by two people who can see the end date. What it produces is a year of pleasant, warm, completely disposable contact, and that is lonelier than being alone, because from the outside it looks exactly like a social life.

You cannot self-care your way out of that. The variable is the calendar.

Two different problems that feel identical

One is: this pace is broken.

The other is: this life is over.

There's a third, and it isn't a travel question at all. If you haven't slept properly or enjoyed anything since spring, moving country won't touch it and neither will going home. Book a video call with a doctor from wherever you are. It's a normal thing to do and it isn't the same conversation as the one about flights.

Of the first two, the second is the one with a name and a plane ticket attached, which is why it's the one that gets picked. Imagine going home on the strength of it, and then finding, some months later, that you miss the work setup, the weather, the not-commuting, all of it — and concluding you're ungrateful or restless, when what you actually did was throw out a working arrangement to solve a scheduling problem.

So be precise before you decide anything. Is the intolerable thing the country you're in, or the fact that you leave every country you're in?

A rough test. Imagine you stay exactly where you are, in the same flat, for the next eight months. Not travelling. Just living there. If that thought comes with relief, you have a pace problem. If it comes with the same flat dread as another month of moving, that's a different answer, and worth taking seriously.

Digital Nomad Diana, an AI advisor on TrueTalk, is free for a first conversation, which is useful here mainly because it's awake at eleven at night and won't tell anyone you asked.

The option nobody names

There's a middle thing between churning and quitting, and it barely gets discussed because it isn't a lifestyle, it's just living somewhere.

Pick one city. Sign a lease — six months minimum, twelve if you can. Not a monthly rental, because monthly rentals keep the exit open and the open exit is the problem. Then, and this is the part that does the actual work, commit to one thing that recurs weekly and has nothing to do with remote work: a climbing gym, a five-a-side team, a choir, a language class with the same twelve people in it, a volunteer shift. Something where the same faces are in the same room on the same day whether you feel like it or not.

That's the whole mechanism. Same people, repeatedly, with a reason to be there other than sociability. It is how adults have always made friends, and it is precisely the thing a thirty-day cycle makes impossible.

Six months of that and you'll know something real about whether the problem was the moving. You'll also have a life, which is not a small side effect.

Going home is a legitimate answer too. Sometimes the thing you want is your mum's kitchen and people who knew you at nineteen, and no amount of Lisbon substitutes for it. But choose it because you want that, not because it's the only option with a name.

What to tell people

You are, right now, negotiating with an audience that isn't watching. The people whose judgement you're braced for stopped thinking about your travels a long time ago. That's not an insult. Attention moves on.

Not all of them, though. Some people did doubt you, one or two will say something, and pretending otherwise is the kind of reassurance that falls apart in the first phone call.

What helps is order and tone. Say it before anyone asks. Announced, it reads as a decision; admitted under questioning, it reads as a collapse. And say it in one flat sentence with no bid for approval attached:

I did it, I got a lot out of it, I'm done with the moving part.

No but. No explaining the visa situation, the exchange rate, the coworking scene. Every clause you add after that sentence is a small request to be found reasonable, and requests invite verdicts.

When someone does the told-you-so, don't argue. Arguing is what converts your decision into a debate you can lose. Yeah, it wasn't for me in the end. Then a question about them. It usually dies there.

The career part, honestly

If you were working the whole time — employed, contracting, running something — there is no gap in the sense that matters. You were working. Your address changed. That's the sentence, and it's the whole answer; the elaboration is what makes it sound like something that needs explaining.

If you spent a chunk of it living on savings and not working, that is a gap. Call it a sabbatical, say one true sentence about what it was for, and stop there. A vague eighteen months is what raises eyebrows. A bounded one with a reason attached is a different object.

How a particular person reads it varies by field, by country and by whoever is holding your CV. If you're in a conservative sector with a long tenure norm, expect it to land differently than it does in software — which is an argument for having your one sentence ready, not an argument against going home.

One genuinely practical thing while you're deciding: tax residency and visa status do not follow your intuitions, and the rules differ substantially between countries. If you've been out of your home country for most of a tax year, get it checked by an accountant who works in your jurisdiction before you make plans around it. Wrong assumptions there are expensive in a way that no article can help with.

You've been calling October a decision. It isn't. Sign a lease somewhere and find out.