Returning home isn't a reset—it's a friction experiment

The romantic notion of returning home, of finding solace and familiarity, often clashes with the stark reality of rediscovery. Bim Adewunmi, freelance journalist and recent transplant back to south London after nearly a decade in Brooklyn, knows this firsthand. Her experience, recounted with wry honesty, reveals a homecoming less about restoration and more about navigating the subtle, sometimes jarring, shifts within a place you thought you knew intimately.

The pull of new soil

Adewunmi’s story begins not with a yearning for childhood haunts, but with an initial assignment. A deliberate twelve-month stint in New York to cover an electric election year was meant to fuel a future memoir chapter. Instead, it became a near-decade commitment. She describes the ease with which she rooted in New York soil—a stark contrast to the metaphorical “fish out of water” persona. “I am the fish that thrives outside the water,” she notes, a testament to her adaptability and perhaps, a subconscious desire for reinvention.

But the narrative takes a poignant turn with the arrival of her toddler, “made and assembled in the US,” a child steeped in Brooklyn culture, tacos, and the peculiar appeal of apple and cinnamon Cheerios. The decision to repatriate, bringing this young life across an ocean, was, in Adewunmi’s words, “hard emotional work.” It wasn’t a choice she readily endorses.

The uncanny valley of home

Returning to London as a parent has fundamentally altered her perspective. The solitary existence of a flat above a cafe in Clapton has been replaced by the demands of a young child, and the geographical familiarities of her youth are now shrouded in an unsettling sense of displacement. “My home city feels like an uncanny valley a lot of the time,” she observes, a fitting description of the feeling of something familiar yet subtly, disturbingly off.

The shift isn't just spatial; it's social. Adewunmi highlights a stark contrast in the cultural landscape—a return to the British reserve she’d seemingly forgotten. A shush in a Royal Academy gallery for her child's enthusiastic observation of a Kerry James Marshall painting, the lack of assistance with a buggy on the Underground—these small interactions underscore a palpable disconnect.

She misses, not London itself, but the vibrant, expansive energy of New York, the openness of its inhabitants. “I miss their chat, their friendliness, their ease with being human,” she writes, encapsulating a longing for a city where strangers readily offer compliments, even if occasionally laced with a bluntness that would be unthinkable in London. The city's green spaces are undeniably a welcome change, but the true craving, she discovers, is for the people who animate a place, the Brooklynites who simply live within it with such palpable enthusiasm.

Thomas Wolfe, famously, wasn't entirely wrong—one can return home. But Adewunmi’s experience offers a more nuanced truth: returning home is an experiment, a process of friction, a constant recalibration against the backdrop of a familiar, yet irrevocably altered, landscape. It’s a journey punctuated not by comforting nostalgia, but by a quiet accumulation of notes, observations, and the ongoing, sometimes surprising, work of redefining “home.”