I’m Colombian. But I’m not the version that usually comes to mind. I’m quiet. I notice things. I think before I speak, sometimes too much. I’m the kind of person who can sit in a loud room and still feel like I’m watching it from a slight distance, present, but processing. That probably sounds like an odd way to start a story about someone who has lived in three countries, worked at sea, fallen in love over TikTok, and moved across the world twice. But that’s exactly the point. Life doesn’t always match the person you imagine yourself becoming.
Colombia
I grew up there. Studied biology there. Became myself there, or at least the first version of myself.
What Colombia gave me isn’t easy to summarize. It’s in the way I cook, the way I pay attention to people, the way I feel things slowly and deeply rather than all at once. It’s a foundation I carry everywhere, even when home feels far away, even when I can’t quite name what I miss.
At some point, I started to feel a pull toward something I couldn’t see yet. Not dissatisfaction exactly. More like curiosity that had outgrown my world a little.
So I left.
The Sea
Before Australia. Before the US. Before everything that came after, there was a season at sea.
I’m not going to go into detail here, partly because that deserves its own post, and partly because some experiences are hard to explain without cheapening them. What I’ll say is this: being that far from everything familiar does something to you. Strips away the noise. Forces a kind of honesty with yourself that’s uncomfortable and necessary at the same time.
I came back know
Australia
I went as a student. First to study English, then early childhood education. Two very different things, that somehow taught me more about people than I expected.
Living abroad as a student is its own particular kind of lonely. You’re surrounded by other people navigating the same thing, which helps, but it doesn’t fully take away the feeling of being slightly out of place in every room. You laugh a half-second later than everyone else because you’re still translating. You order food and hope for the best. You call home and try to explain your life to people who love you but can’t quite picture where you are.
It becomes normal. And then one day it becomes home. And then you leave and miss it.
That cycle, I’ve been through it enough times now that I recognize it. It doesn’t get easier. You just get better at sitting with it.ing things about myself I didn’t know before. That felt like enough.
The Part I Didn’t See Coming
I met someone on TikTok.
I know. I know.
We talked for a while, long enough to feel real, short enough that meeting in person still felt slightly terrifying. Our first meeting was at a US airport, during a layover. Which is either wildly romantic or logistically chaotic, depending on your personality type. For me, it was both, mostly the second one, but I showed up anyway.
He then came to Colombia. Properly. Met my world, my people, the version of me that only exists there.
And then I moved to the United States.
I still think about how quickly that all happened. How one conversation on a phone screen eventually became a life I couldn’t have planned if I tried.
Motherhood
This one is harder to write about, not because it’s sad, but because it’s so much at once.
Having a baby is the most complete thing I’ve ever felt. It somehow makes you feel fuller and more fragile at the exact same time. You don’t realize how much you needed your mother until you become one. You don’t realize how far away home is until you’re holding someone who needs you to be theirs.
My family wasn’t in that room. That’s a fact I’ve turned over in my mind many times. Not with bitterness, more with a kind of quiet ache that I think a lot of immigrant mothers carry and don’t talk about enough.
It has been beautiful. It has also been hard in ways that sneak up on you. Both things are true and neither cancels the other out.
Why I Started This Blog
Honestly? I was sitting there one afternoon, baby on my chest, phone in hand, looking for something to read that felt like my life.
Not aspirational. Not perfectly lit. Not someone who had it figured out. Just someone real, in the middle of it, writing it down.
I couldn’t find exactly that. So here I am.
Maybe I’m writing this because I wanted to know someone else felt this way too. I’m writing it because I think there are more of us than we realize, women living between places, between languages, between who we were and who we’re still becoming. Women who love their lives and still feel the weight of everything they left behind.
This blog is me figuring out what home means when you’ve had so many of them. And what it means to build one, slowly, in a place that isn’t where you started.
I don’t have the answers yet. But I’m still here, still exploring.
And I think that counts for something .