🪐 Life of an in-betweener

A patchwork story of culture, belonging, and the search for home

They say you can only be from one place. But what if your soul is stamped with too many border crossings, too many accents, too many memories wrapped in mismatched time zones, and too many versions of yourself? I was born in Milan, but my life has stretched across London, Zurich, Dublin, and beyond. Somewhere between Costa coffee and Tiroler Speck, I’ve learned this: home is complicated.

I touched on my struggle with the idea of home in my post FreeBSD, Workstation and … Home, and brushed past how my travels shaped me in Life in Rochester, Minnesota. But now I want to go deeper, to explore why the idea of home has never felt simple, and why my cultural patchwork can be as much a bridge as a barrier. Sometimes, it doesn’t help me fit in, and it sets me apart instead.

Maybe home was never meant to be a place. Maybe it’s a feeling you build with rituals, music, and quiet moments of comfort, something small but still yours. And maybe, just maybe, it’s still out there. Not yet found, but always gently calling.

I’ve lived in cities where I knew every shortcut and station, where the cashier remembered my name and the waiter knew my allergies already. In certain flats, whether in South London or back in Milan, I’d slip off my shoes and step into soft clothes the moment I walked in, like switching into a more authentic version of myself. On winter evenings in London, I’d warm up chicken & leek soup and let it simmer while the gentle hum of servers buzzed in the storage room, a sound that strangely made me feel less alone. There were days with rain on the window, coffee in hand, and a specific playlist in the background that made the space feel like mine. Not quite home, but close enough to remember it later and feel something stir. Then, always, the same rhythm: bags packed, lights off, another key returned.

People often ask me where I’m from. The question should be easy, but it isn’t. I was born in Milan, and yet, it never fully felt like mine. My thinking often runs in British wit but organizes itself with the quiet logic I’ve picked up across Europe. My pantry holds Rummo pasta between Waitrose shortbread and Speck from Innsbruck. My internal calendar still calculates train delays in UK terms, but longs for the Swiss timetable precision I once relied on. I’ve lived enough lives in enough cities that no one label quite fits. Some parts of me were shaped in Dublin classrooms, others on Zurich trams, others still in South London cafes or queuing in traffic on Milan’s tangenziale. When I answer, I say “it’s complicated”, and I mean it in the most literal way.

Sometimes, I envy those who can point to a single village, a street, or even a dialect and say, “That’s where I’m from”. Me? My origin is more like a system log: scattered entries, mismatched time zones, and occasional packet loss. A patchwork of cities, rented flats, forgotten hotel rooms, and the humming warmth of server fans in converted storage rooms.

I’ve learned to make comfort portable: the ritual of slipping into a hoodie and leggings that have seen few countries, the soft hiss of my kettle, my OpenWRT router with my VPNs, and the playlist I named Home. These aren’t just habits: they’re placeholders for a home I’ve never quite found.

Over time, I’m trying to accept what I quietly knew all along: I’m an in-betweener. Not just in geography, but in identity, language, emotions. I live in the hyphens, the translations, the middle lanes of culture. Not fully this, not entirely that, and yet somehow, fully me.

And still, I search. Not with urgency, but with the quiet persistence of a shell script running in the background:

$ while true; do echo "Where is home?"; sleep 86400; done

I carry my patchwork of cultures in the little things: in the way I choose coffee and breakfast in the morning, filtered with a full English when I need home and comfort food, or Austrian cold cuts with a cafe creme, or Italian biscuits with milk and coffee, depending on how I feel that same day. In the way I queue like a British commuter, with silent discipline and passive-aggressive eye rolls. In my obsession with being on time, like I’ve internalised a Swiss train schedule. And in the quiet, inherited Italian instinct that tells me when an outfit is wrong, even if I can’t explain why.

Even when these layers feel natural to me, they often confuse others, as if they expect one cultural script, and I’m speaking from several. It’s not just difference that unsettles them, but unfamiliarity: many of the people I meet have rarely seen anything outside their own stage directions.

There’s a quiet tension in being shaped by many places, yet belonging fully to none. When people ask where I’m from, I hesitate… not because I’m lost, but because the real answer tends to cause confusion, or worse, follow-up questions that I would struggle to handle. My instinct is to say I’m from South London, born in Milan. It’s true, technically. But it leaves too much out, and putting everything in would risk overwhelming them (and possibly triggering an existential crisis). Zurich and Dublin shaped me in ways I can’t untangle. My cadenced trips to San Francisco gave me a “bay area” twist (and displease for american coffee!). And Innsbruck? A city I navigate like my own. I’ve never owned a house there, but my aunt and uncle’s home has felt like mine for over two decades. My aunt always said, “This is also your home”, and even without a key, I’ve known where everything is, like I’ve had one all along.

Trying to sum that up in small talk is like handing someone a patchwork quilt and saying: “Here, it’s a flag”.

And then, layered over all of that, is another kind of complexity. The one of being Tara.

I will say this: identity isn’t just about the languages I speak or the countries I’ve lived in. It’s also about the quiet negotiations I make every day, in how I show up, how I’m read, and how I claim space. Some of these things are gently worn, not declared.

And even beyond that, there’s the way my mind works, often running at a different frequency. I’m drawn to patterns, systems, interconnections. My idea of fun might be dissecting a network topology, trying a new operating system, or planning a flight through cross-border airspace (that’s easy, mate!). I’ve trained across disciplines, across countries, even across altitudes. I’ve flown seaplanes in Vancouver, navigated complex infrastructures across Europe, and solved problems that didn’t have a name yet.

These aren’t just hobbies or job descriptions, they’re reflections of how I process the world. I get genuinely excited about geeky conversations, about space missions, about psychology, about trance and electronic dance music. But in most circles, I often feel like a strange note in a familiar song. Too curious, too layered, too “other” for neat categorisation.

This difficulty in fitting into neat categories is precisely why “home” has always been complicated. When you’re not one thing, but many: not from here or there, but stretched across timelines, disciplines, and versions of self, the question of belonging becomes layered. Sometimes, it’s not that I don’t belong anywhere. It’s that I belong in ways too fluid for one place to hold and for others to understand and accept.

So for now, I retreat to my offline outpost -part real, part imagined- where systems hum softly, my useless projects come alive and thoughts run deep. It’s the silence that doesn’t judge, the slowness that matches the internal clock of my true self, and the cinnamon bun baked slowly on quiet Sundays, something that remembers someone who mattered. Maybe home isn’t a fixed point on a map, but something that lives in these rituals, these longings, and that quiet wooden cabin I still dream of, somewhere between mountains, lakes, memory, and the freedom to just be. For now, I adapt. And that’s more than enough.

// 🌷 Call Sign: Tulpe della Montagna — QRP transmission active