Amanda Molenaar spent most of her 20s and 30s living abroad; now she finds it hard to answer where home is.
Provided by Amanda Molenaar
After spending a good chunk of my formative 20s and 30s abroad, I lost my sense of home.I was 19 when I took a break from my studies and spent a year and a half in South America, which kick-started my love for the continent and for living in a different culture. Since then, I've lived in Buenos Aires, London, Brasilia, and Rio de Janeiro, partly as a diplomat — a lifestyle that suited me perfectly.I lived in all these places for relatively short periods, between 6 months and 3 years, and also often moved back to the Netherlands, where I'm from, in between. That meant a lot of change — and a certain permanent level of uprootedness — in the years that shaped me as an adult.Most of my friends from back home stayed close to where they grew up.Multiple countries started to shape meI landed my first office job after finishing my master's degree in London. So my introduction to the corporate world came with cultural differences, too. I experienced office politics through the British lens and navigated filing my taxes in a different system.Three years later, after being hired by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, I found myself in a completely new setting as a diplomat in Brazil.I was building a life in another language, creating a routine in a new environment, and navigating systems that worked differently from what I was used to, both personally and professionally. I remember representing my country for the first time in Portuguese — a moment that highlighted that another world had become my new normal.
