Home is a Feeling I’ll Always Have Within Myself — Isabel Marcelo

In 2017, I moved to London with my best friend, Lien.

We were 21 and we'd finally left Perth and were on our own, away from anything and everyone we ever knew.

We lived in a 1-bedroom, East London flat on the top floor of a brown-bricked building. Every morning I'd wake up, look out my window, and in the distance, I'd see the London Eye. As cheesy and cliché as it was, it was one of those pinch-me-moments. Like I'd finally made it and I was living the life my younger self had always dreamt of.

It took a few months to settle into the city but by the end of my first year, I was working part-time at a cafe and part-time at my dream job – an E-Commerce and Marketing role at one of my favorite fashion brands. I was the happiest I'd ever been.

Then, after a weekend trip to Madrid, Lien and I returned to London and the city felt different. We felt different. Lien wanted to be back with her family and something I couldn’t quite understand was pulling me back to Perth. So we decided to leave London.

5 days before my flight, I met a guy. Typical.

His name was Brad. He spoke to me about magazines and cool things I pretended to know about.

Lien and I met up with him for drinks (me not realizing it was meant to be a date). I very quickly found myself more and more drawn to him and by the second bar, while Lien was grabbing the next round of Old Fashioneds, Brad and I shared a kiss. I caught up with Brad a couple more times until it was time for Lien and me to leave.

Lien went back to Perth and I went off to Spain for a month. My brother met up with me and we traveled around together. Our last stop was in London. We were there for a week. Enough time for Brad and me to fall in love. I told him I felt like I still had to go back to Perth but that I'd be back soon.

I lasted 3 months in Perth before I was back on a plane, headed to London.

I spent the rest of my visa living with Brad in an East London warehouse. I was back in the city I felt most at home in, back with the love of my life, and back at my cafe job. I was so so happy.

And then my visa ran out. And I had no way of staying.

I'd never experienced heartbreak until the day my visa ran out. I thought I had come back because I was meant to be in London forever. How could things have turned out this way? Why would the Universe have led me back to London only to have to leave again? So many questions were running through my head, and I couldn't find the answers.

In my first year back in Perth, I cried almost every day. I was in a long-distance relationship not knowing when we'd be able to see each other again, going from one barista job to the next, and then on top of it all, a pandemic hit.

I felt stuck. Stuck in a city I never wanted to come back to. And I felt lost – like I didn't know who I was anymore.

It was the hardest year of my life. But as devastated as I was, there was always a small voice in my head that kept telling me, "You are experiencing this for a reason. Find the lesson." That voice in my head kept me going.

Eventually, I learned to accept that I was going to be in Perth longer than I thought. With that acceptance – my life started to turn around. I stopped working in cafe jobs I hated and started focusing on freelancing. I started attracting aligned opportunities and I was growing more than ever.

I’ve spent my life looking for a home. I found it in London and I found it in Brad. But in that time when I didn’t have those two, I realized that home was always going to be a feeling and that I always had it within myself.