Advice from seasoned female nomads on finding home.

When I left New York in 2019, it was in search for a new home. I was quite unhappy living in the city and I wanted to find where “home” was.

I seemed to have experienced peace and happiness when I traveled outside the country, so I figured that home was somewhere abroad.

So I did what any nomad would do and packed my bags and went on that adventure to find home.

I mean, the world was now my oyster. But maybe there were many too many options. Did I want to live on a beach in Mexico? Or stick to a big city like Buenos Aires?

So in order to get a better grasp on how to figure this thing out, I consulted with other experienced female nomads and asked them how they found “home”.

From the research that I’ve done, here are a couple of themes that kept emerging in the conversations.

Finding Home Comes from A Feeling

When I talked to female nomads, a lot of them told me that home can from a “hunch” or a “feeling” around a place. Many have said that they had this feeling inside like it was exactly where they needed to be at this moment. I could resonate with that feeling because I’ve had that in certain places like Buenos Aires, Madrid, or Tel Aviv. I knew that I felt something there, but it was like I couldn’t explain why. When I talked to these woman, they encouraged me to follow these feelings, because that can be a great guide to finding your place (or places).

Finding Home Can Be A Journey

Another theme that kept emerging from the people that I talked to is that finding a home is a journey. For most, they had to roam a bit before they could settle their roots. They tried many places for small periods of time before they found where home was. In that way, it was like a process of elimination sorting through what they liked and didnt like about a place. In some sense, it could be similar to dating, where many dating experts tell you to just go on the date in order to find the characteristics in a man that you want and don’t want. Same can be true with a place. Many woman had to go on that nomadic journey first, try a few places out and then determine where they wanted to plant their roots.

Home has many different meanings to different people.

When I talked to nomads, there was some variety to what home meant to them. For some, home was on the road. Home was wherever they went, or wherever a spouse and their children were. It didn’t matter where the actual location was, but it was the people that they were with, and it was what they brought to that place that made it feel like home. For others, “home” was a place. It was a place where they could plop down their things as a base, and then travel from there. For some they liked the idea of having a place where they could keep their things and constantly come back to. But the theme here was that home had many definitions.

Home could be in one place or maybe a couple of places.

Another interesting theme that emerged was that home didn’t necessarily have to be one place that stole their heart. In fact, people talked about a couple of places that they call home. Sure, they may spend a large majority of their time in one, but they have a couple of places on their list that feel like home that they constantly come back to. It felt a little bit like polygamy to me, but for homes. It had me think that maybe we don’t have to choose only one place, but we could have a couple of places that we could call home.

Home is always where you are.

The last piece of advice that I got from the seasoned nomads is that home starts with you. Sure, it’s important to find the places that speak to you in certain ways. As one woman put it, home is where there are opportunities, people, and surroundings that you like are. Sure, that is important. But also a part of it, is what you add to that home. Home is a spirit inside of you. Women have told me that it is important that they are always constantly feeling at home with themselves, no matter where they chose to build their exterior home. It’s an inward and self discovery journey (which in fact, led many to where their exterior home is.)

So there’s a bit of advice that I got from these lovely ladies! I definitely feel a bit more equipped now to go and find what home means for me. How about you? What does home mean for you?