Growing Up Without Roots

I always envied people who grew up in the same street, with the same neighbour who watched them grow. Kids who had a bedroom that stayed their bedroom for decades. Kids who didn’t have to learn a new school map every year.

That wasn’t my life.

By the time I was old enough to roll my eyes and slam a door, we had lived in so many houses that I can’t remember the wallpaper or the colour of the curtains. I went to nine schools. I was the new girl more often than I was anything else.

You learn things when you’re constantly new.

You learn how to walk into a room where everyone already knows each other and pretend you’re confident. You learn how to keep your eyes open, how to read a room, how to find the quiet kids, how to survive.

And you learn that belonging is not a building.
Belonging is something you carry inside.

There was a loneliness in it, of course. I had no childhood best friend with matching bracelets and sleepovers every weekend. Sometimes I would look at other girls and wonder what it would feel like to be chosen by a friend. To be the safe place someone came to.

Instead, I was constantly arriving and constantly leaving.

I didn’t realise until much later that this way of growing up made me incredibly adaptable. It gave me a spirit that doesn’t panic in chaos. Change is my oxygen. When life shifts under me, I don’t collapse — I stretch.

As an adult, I continued the pattern.
More houses. More towns. More jobs. I have had more jobs than years on this earth, and I’m not sorry. Every job was a mini-universe. Every place I lived taught me something new.

Sometimes people say, “You can’t keep running.”

But I wasn’t running.
I was exploring.

I was collecting lives. Collecting stories. Collecting versions of myself.

It also meant I never built long-term friendships. My sister — my half-sister — is the closest, and she didn’t arrive until later in life. My daughter is my anchor, but I don’t put all my weight on her. That wouldn’t be fair. She is 23, with her own wings to grow.

Does it get lonely? Of course. But loneliness and peace are not the same thing.

When you strip away the noise, the clubs, the friendships built on convenience, the small talk, you are left with yourself. And at some point I had to ask:

Am I good company to myself?

That was the beginning of real growth.

I stopped numbing. I stopped pretending. I stopped trying to fit a world that was never designed for someone like me.

Now, I love my own company. I love silence. I love lying in a bath until my fingers wrinkle, watching the steam curl up like prayers. I love that my life is my own creation, not something I was taught to replicate.

Growing up without roots gave me wings.
It taught me that connection doesn’t have to look like coffee dates and best friends and birthdays. Sometimes connection is softer. It is a shared smile with a stranger. A conversation with a woman at a petrol station. A massage therapist who knows you don’t want to talk, just breathe.

There is beauty in being untethered.
There is freedom in not belonging anywhere.

Today, I don’t chase roots.
But I plant moments of presence.

And the truth is, I feel at home everywhere now — because I finally feel at home inside myself.