I moved away from my home country 6 years ago. When I returned, I felt like an outsider.

I grew up in Mexico City and spent most of my life there. Six years ago, I left the country, first for the US and later for the UK, but I never stopped thinking of my birthplace as the place I ultimately belonged.

This summer, I returned after two years away, the longest stretch I had ever gone without visiting home. I expected the trip to feel nostalgic and effortless.

Instead, I was surprised by how tiring it felt and, for the first time, how slightly out of place I seemed to be.

Mexico City had changed while I was away

The first thing that struck me was how different the city itself felt. Mexico City had always been huge, chaotic, and international in its own way, but the version I returned to felt noticeably more cosmopolitan than the one I remembered.

There were new restaurants everywhere, more international businesses, more English being spoken around me, and far more foreigners than I remembered seeing before I left. Areas that once felt deeply familiar now seemed to belong to a newer version of the city.

I did not necessarily dislike any of it. But it surprised me how quickly I started feeling like someone who had missed a chapter. I was the one asking what had opened, what had closed, where people went now, and which places had become popular. For the first time, I was not the person who knew instinctively how the city worked.

That was strange because I had always thought of Mexico City as something fixed in my life. I was the one who had moved away, so part of me had unconsciously expected it to remain roughly as I had left it.

The city had changed, but many of the people I knew somehow hadn’t

Mexico City felt almost unrecognizable in places, but spending time with people I had known for years created the opposite sensation. Despite all the time that had passed, some conversations felt as though I had only been away for a few weeks.

On paper, a lot had changed. Friends had gotten married, moved in with partners, started having children, changed jobs, and taken on responsibilities that did not exist when we were younger. Their lives had clearly moved forward.

And yet, with certain exceptions, I sometimes found myself listening to the same stories, the same frustrations, and even the same problems I remembered from years earlier. Certain relationship dynamics had barely shifted. People worried about versions of the same things they had worried about before I left.

It was a strange feeling. I had expected two years away to make everyone seem dramatically different, particularly because so many of them had crossed major life milestones in that time. Instead, I often recognized not just the people themselves, but the exact patterns I remembered.

There was something comforting about that familiarity, but also something disorienting. The city around us seemed to have accelerated, while parts of the social world I had left behind felt almost preserved.

That contrast eventually forced me to consider another possibility. Maybe the reason everything felt so different to me was not because everyone else had changed beyond recognition. Maybe I had.

I realized the biggest change was me

The last two years have probably changed me more than I understood before this trip. My relationship became more serious, and my partner and I started living together, which altered the rhythm of my everyday life in ways that felt gradual at the time but obvious once I stepped away from them.

I no longer organize my days entirely around myself. We make plans together, decide how to spend our weekends, travel as a couple, share responsibilities, and build routines around one another. Even the boring parts of life, like deciding what to eat or how to spend a quiet evening, have become part of a shared structure.

Being back in Mexico made me notice how attached I had become to that structure. I missed my apartment, my work routine, my evenings with my partner, and even the ordinary habits I would never normally think were worth missing. The things pulling me back were not landmarks or anything particularly British. They were simply the details of the life I had built.

That realization helped explain why the trip had felt so tiring and unfamiliar. Mexico was still deeply important to me, and the people I loved there were still part of who I was, but the center of my everyday existence had shifted somewhere else.

For years, I thought of myself as someone who lived in London but went home to Mexico. This trip made me realize that London is home now.