On place and identity

From Scotland to New York City and back again; vulnerable feelings

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A month ago we moved to Glasgow, Scotland. This has been our FIFTH move since we left New York and became pregnant with our son. He just turned five.

This is too much moving!

It has been almost six years of life turning me around again and again, leaving me dizzy and scattered. Moving country (then more moving), new motherhood and then a pandemic has been a heady mix that has dismantled who I thought I was and left me, dazed, to put myself back together anew.

None of this was my plan when we moved from Brooklyn to London almost six years ago (!) but the universe had other ideas. And I think I have been brought where I need to be right now.

To backtrack: I grew up in Scotland but I never felt very Scottish. My mother spent her childhood in Hong Kong and Australia and her extended family have always lived, and continue to live, in various places around the world. This was a huge part of the mythology of my childhood - I absorbed the idea that we were people not from here and, judging by my mother, longing to be elsewhere. This seeped into me, as a kid.

Baby me

For as long as I can remember I dreamed about being somewhere else. I think I felt that in order to really be someone, I had to physically be somewhere else.

As a teenager, I did not care that I was living in a beautiful green country full of wildflowers and good schools and free healthcare. I felt a deep longing for a life elsewhere.

I had fallen in love with New York City whilst studying abroad at RISD during art school, so when I was feeling lost after graduating, I saved all my waitressing money, bought flights and went back for a while. I had no plan and the story of how and why I ended up staying is for another day (a love story!) but I always felt deeply and fully myself in New York. I was in a place where everyone had big dreams, and people were living them!

Working with my florist friend in NY circa 2011

I lived there for ten years and felt so happy to be a New Yorker. It was such an ingrained part of my identity, that when we chose to move to London in 2018 I wasn’t expecting my sense of self to fall of a cliff.

I was pregnant in a new city, a new country and feeling lonely - but I was still in a big city (still in my mind at this point: capital city = success) and returning to New York regularly for work. I was a New Yorker! An international woman working in fashion!! But then, the baby came. No more traveling to New York. Then the pandemic came. Definitely no more traveling to New York. In fact, no more living in London, either, because why were we struggling to pay to live in a tiny flat when we couldn’t work or enjoy the benefits of said cool capital city?

We ran away to Scotland, to the countryside where my parents live. We were very fortunate to have this sanctuary but I can’t say I felt thrilled about what it meant for who I was. It was a strange and scary time. But then there was all my large and messy LOVE for my kid. And painting saved me, and the trees. I started to get out of my (self-critical) mind and connect back to this wild and fecund land where I was born. To feel the purple hills and wildflowers in my bones.

Wow, I thought, it’s beautiful here. It’s part of me.

I hand’t noticed. I had been so desperate to leave.