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I left Romania 20 years and 93 days ago… and counting.

There were many reasons for my departure — reasons I won’t go into now — but one of them was a quiet, persistent ache. A sense of seeking and not finding. I didn’t have the language for it back then, but now I understand that what I was wrestling with was loneliness.

In my young mind, I had already drawn a conclusion: whatever I was looking for was not there. I had searched for it so much, how could it be there? So I looked outward, as we often do when we carry unhealed wounds. We search for something out there to make the pain make sense. Maybe the right country. Maybe the right job. The right partner. The right diagnosis.

Loneliness, I’ve come to realise, often moves beneath this restless search. It swims quietly in the deeper waters, disguised as hope: If only I can find that missing piece… And it’s always almost within reach. Almost. That’s the word that haunts.

Having lived in two different countries — Cyprus and the UK — for over two decades, I’ve come to a difficult realisation: I may never feel the same sense of home again. At least, not in the way I once did. As a dear friend once said to me, for many of us who’ve left our countries of birth, the best we can hope for is a “home base.” A landing place. But not home, not quite.

Mircea Cărtărescu, a beloved Romanian writer, expressed something similar in a podcast where he reflected on his time in New York (translation mine):

“In Romania you feel legitimate, you feel like everyone else… you have all the codes. You know when someone is looking down on you, and how they speak when they do that. You know when someone admires you — it’s a different way of speaking. Abroad, you’re kind of like an autistic person who has to decipher every situation, has to understand it rationally. Here in Romania, we don’t need to think… everything flows… it’s a simple game.”

I resonate deeply with this. Living abroad, even in an era of constant digital connection, still challenges the most fundamental part of who I am — my sense of authenticity. Over time, I’ve added more layers to my cultural identity, but not without confusion. The more cultural selves I carry, the easier it is to lose track of the original one.

Lately, I’ve noticed a pattern: when I’m in the UK, I find myself drawn to Romanian books, music, and podcasts. And when I’m back in Romania, I start gravitating toward English content. It’s as if each place awakens an opposite longing. I live in the in-between now — a mixture of selves. It takes conscious effort, respect and compassion, to honour both of these inheritances.

In the Netflix series Stories of a Generation, the late Pope Francis speaks with tenderness about tradition. He praises tradition as a ‘struggle to keep the roots,’ while clarifying that this ‘does not mean that we are traditionalists. A static tradition is useless.’

It reminds me of a related insight from Carl Jung:

“From the unconscious there emanate determining influences… which, independently of tradition, guarantee in every single individual a similarity and even a sameness of experience…”

It’s this sameness that I feel when I return to Romania. An unspoken recognition. A sensory familiarity. Something in me relaxes. And it’s also what my being craves so intensely when I’m away from it. That feeling of I know this, I belong here, I don’t have to explain.

And yet… for me it can’t be fully recovered. Not anymore. Not completely. Which brings me back to the beginning: the search for something that cannot quite be found. A kind of existential longing. A loneliness that is less about being alone, and more about being unrooted.

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And what about you? Where do your roots lie? What languages, places, customs— or even smells and songs — have shaped the core of who you are? Whether you’ve moved far from home or stayed close, I believe that cultural identity is rarely static. It seems to shift, expand, and sometimes aches. But within that complexity, there may also be wisdom. What parts of your heritage do you carry with pride? And what parts are still waiting to be reclaimed?