Home is where the heart is

Imagine if someone told you that you should pack up your belongings and leave your home and move to another country. What if they asked you "So when are you gonna stop living here and finally move?" What if they dismissed it as your home and referred to it as some kind of adventure or a phase, as though you're escaping reality or something, while for you it's home. This is often what happens whenever someone chooses to live in a country that is not their home country. It's ok to move to a different country for a while, maybe 2 years, even more, but then you get to a point where people start to demand your return. This can be very stressful if you really don't want to move, if where you are living now has become home to you and you couldn't imagine leaving it. You might get accused of being selfish.

To those people who have never felt the inclination to live somewhere other than the country that they were born in, I say good for you, but consider that not everyone is cut from the same cloth, and consider how it would feel if someone told you that you should leave your home, and labeled your life temporary, fake, an adventure etc.
It's a bizarre feeling actually, to be made to feel as though your reality is not really reality. You may have thought it was during these years but it really isn't and it's time for the adventure to stop and for reality to begin, and the only way for that to happen is if you drop everything and move "home". Quit your job, say goodbye to the friends that have you have made there, leave the apartment/house that you have lived in for the past years. But what if "home" isn't really your home anymore? What if in your heart, this other place is your home now? Doesn't matter right, because how could you not want to live in the place you were born? You may travel and try living elsewhere, but in the end you should live and die where you were born. It's that simple.

Well...it's really not that simple. For some of us, living our whole lives where we were born is simply not an option. It may be hard to believe, but we don't all love our hometown, or our home country for that matter. Some of us feel more at home somewhere else. That cliché "Home is where the heart is" may be old and worn out but it's true nonetheless. What's to say that we must live and die in the same spot, or at least in the same country? If we feel happier somewhere else, why can't we live there instead?
Yes, there are family connections, and there is such a thing as roots. Although it's hard to live so far away from family and old friends, it sometimes just can't be helped. And as for the requests made by family and friends that you should move "back home", I can reverse that request and ask them why they can't pick up and move to where I am, since they miss me so much. That's ridiculous and unrealistic of course, they would answer, and they'd be right.
But at the same time it's not unfair to ask me to pack up and leave my home as if the past 5 years or so didn't even matter?

You can be born in one place and grow up there but feel the pull towards a completely different place. It's not so clear-cut for everyone. We don't all love where we come from and feel that we belong there. And it's not so easy when everyone else seems to assume that you should just easily be able to come back home and resume your old life, while everything inside you tells you that you don't want to.
The love one person has for their hometown might just be the same kind of love that you have for this new place. Who knows.

And if something bad should happen to you in your new country, the people back home would immediately go "Oh see, this would never have happened if you lived here! You should come home now!"
What, shit never happens in my home country? If I lived there I would never get mugged, have my heart broken, get into a car accident, have my house robbed?

So, imagine if you were constantly told that you had to leave your hometown that you love and would never want to leave, then try to put yourself in the position of those who feel the opposite - they don't want to drop their new life to come back to a place that they obviously must not have felt completely happy in, or else why would they have left it in the first place?