Over the last six or seven years living abroad in the faraway place of Munich, Germany, I’ve often wondered when, or even whether, I might return home to Melbourne, Australia. Even though I never spent much time contemplating my distant future, my mother certainly didn’t let me forget that she wished to have me back at home sooner rather than later. I'd listen to her talk in absolutes every return visit, “when you’re back next year…,” and so on. I shrugged it off as just motherly love. I'm in Germany, Mum, and I’m staying here for now!

Despite this, the thought in the back of my mind that this overseas journey would in all likelihood be ephemeral proved to be a constant burden. Wherever I went, whichever decision I made, the immense doubt haunted me. Before the COVID pandemic, I had originally planned to study my Master’s, probably work a couple of years at a local company “in the industry”, and then return home ideally feeling fulfilled and satisfied. Like I had earnt some kind of imaginary certificate of intercultural aptitude. Secretly however, I imagined falling in love with a beautiful German girl and living in the idyllic Bavarian countryside, happily ever after, even if I was unwilling to admit it even to myself.

But given the retreat of pandemic-related restrictions and regulations was so gradual, as were too the many changes in my life circumstances in-between, it never seemed like quite the right time to draw a line in the sand. It would seem I became the frog in boiling water.

Finally, maybe around late 2023, things seemed to have settled. I chose to move into my own apartment, after my roommate moved in with his girlfriend. It became clear to me that I would soon have to give serious thought as to whether I wanted to return home, or if I wanted to seriously commit to “being German.” The weight I was carrying was growing heavier, and somehow I knew this was slowing me down. I just didn't realise how much exactly.

In the first few years here, sure—it never made much sense to paint my student dorm room or invest in expensive furniture, even once I began earning a full-time salary—I figured I probably wouldn’t be here much longer, anyway. But as the years went by and the dorm rooms became my own rental apartments, I could feel the desire to invest in long-term commitments grow stronger within me. Actually bringing any of them to fruition, on the other hand, seemed impossible. I could hardly bring myself to buy a dishwasher for the longest time: moving countries could have always been right around the corner, so I had better not waste the money and effort.

Never knowing when I was going to leave, I froze in the face of more important decisions, even ones that might have promised to greatly improve my quality of life, and that seemed frankly banal to outsiders. It plagued the back of my mind when searching for the motivation to meet people or go on dates. What if I eventually want to go home? Will she lose interest in me because I’m a flight risk?

Whenever I would meet someone in my daily life, they would inevitably ask me whether I would like to stay in Germany forever or if I plan to move home at some stage. Over the years, I learnt to come with pre-prepared answers that suggested I was comfortable with my open-ended life abroad. But I wasn’t. I felt trapped, like I couldn’t go anywhere. Like I couldn’t start any meaningful projects. I wanted to take on so much more and feel resolute in each step. But I felt suffocated by the idea that the rug would soon be pulled out from under my feet.

I did however eventually start voicing the idea that, as long as I don’t meet anybody here that I come to love so much that I simply must stay, it would be better for me to go home. That was the beginning of the end, I suppose, but the thought was so limp in spirit that it hardly made any difference in my life. Instead it was the perfect excuse to remain undecided: at any moment, the love of my life could waltz around the corner. Ironically, this straitjacket of indecision all but prevented me from doing anything about my bachelorhood.

Things did improve; I grew adamant that I would break down old habits that were once born of helplessness. I found it increasingly easier to “just do things,” as the chronically online say, but there was an upper limit to their magnitude. Such things as buying more expensive home furnishings or making slightly more long-term commitments became easier (think “one year” rather than “a couple of months”), but nonetheless I stillfelt tremendously stuck.

In the summer of 2025, my parents visited and stayed with me for two months, during which we went on many European trips alongside my daily life in Munich. Afterwards, I joined them on the plane ride home and visited Melbourne. This time, it was outside of the usual Christmas holiday period so as to really get a sense of how life back home had changed.

I stayed a month, bringing the total time spent with family and friends to three months, which was a lot of time for me after having lived for so long abroad. Alhoutgh I had visited for a month almost every year, this time around felt a bit different. I felt like I was actually back home, and not just peering through the window. Maybe it was the time of year, maybe because of the high school reunion I attended, or maybe even just due to how much time had passed since COVID. Whatever it was, those three months made their mark. After saying our goodbyes at the airport, I headed to stand in line at the first security checkpoint. After turning the corner, I lost sight of my parents, and my heart sank.

For the first time in seven years, something felt wrong. I didn’t want to leave any more. I realised that my time in Munich was over. After two years of deliberating over the minutiae of my life and where I lived, the epiphany seemed to come in an instant. It was emotional. There was no logical breakthrough. No intellectual victory. I was just homesick. After six years, no less.

Once I arrived back in Munich, everything about this charming place became grossly annoying overnight. The northern winter annoyed me. The people annoyed me. My job annoyed me. My entire surroundings were so fastidious that I couldn’t wait to get home. Even the German language that has brought me so much joy to learn, to which I effortlessly dedicated so much time and interest; even it became a nuisance. I wanted my native tongue back. I wanted effortless freedom of expression back. I was imprinted with a culture when I was younger and I just wanted it back.

Paradoxically, though, I felt fully liberated all of a sudden. Free to do whatever I wanted. Having made the decision to pack up and leave filled me with such a profound sense of direction that everything else was able to just slide into place, as if a circuit had been completed.

By forfeiting many potential futures for just one that I could count on, the organisation of the rest of my life was able to spontaneously emerge. I guess I always sensed this would happen, but I seriously underestimated the ramifications. A cataclysmic domino effect resolved a hierarchy of assumptions about who I was, where I was, and what I was doing, running incredibly deep. Before, I was basically floundering. Even though I could feel that I knew what feeling I wanted out of life—and indeed I strove to work towards it&mash;I was nonetheless totally directionless. And it was painful. Not so any more.

The irony of all this is that by making this decision, I suddenly feel like I know what I’m doing here right now and can arrange the coming months accordingly. I feel freer that ever to date people in Germany and with even more intention than I did before. I feel like I have permission to take on any domestic projects I feel like. Isn’t that strange? I sure thought so. In all honesty I expected the opposite outcome. But now there’s a timeline: I can see how it all fits into the grand plan.

There are more reasons to move home, however, than just family and friends, as important as they are to me. They were simply the more obvious tip of the iceberg, as it were.

Trying to live in two cultures at once results in a kind of purgatory, and I suppose I never quite committed to living in one or the other. But over the last few years, especially upon contemplating the physiological and psychological impact of learnt helplessness, it became clear that there was a deep desire in me to self-actualise, and that it should be given more serious attention. During my preteen and early teen years, I was a prolific user of the Adobe suite, I loved to draw, write stories, and produce music. I loved to make silly games and build worlds with atmosphere. It was here where I was completely in my element, and I sense deep within myself that I need to reprise these pursuits. Alas, it would seem I can hardly find the time (or if I am honest, the energy) to invest in them. I have mostly blamed this on my day job, but it has become increasingly obvious that I’m mostly being stifled simply by living alone in a foreign country.

The purpose of a culture is apparently to obviate the need to think about what to do as much as possible so as to free up energy for more niche specialisation. Having to think about how to greet somebody, or what is appropriate to do in public versus in private, or even what amount and what type of conversation is appropriate, and with whom—these are all things that are imparted simply by virtue of growing up in a particular culture. They are acquired in similar fashion to language (and some might say that these two are indeed exactly the same thing). If it weren’t for these effortless assumptions, it might become an exhausting moment-by-moment decision making process, in perpetuity. The broader cultural context can take care of much of this, both in the aforementioned sense of traditions and customs as well as by making use of particular industrial specialisations, such as manufacturing and the provision of services and application of expertise. This way, you can focus on you, so you can “relax into complexity”.

The imprinting of childhood seems especially important. It's possible, and certainly proven in the case of language acquisition, that children growing up with multiple cultural contexts in parallel find the context-switching relatively painless and easy, if not equally as easy as the monoculturally reared child. These additional cultures are like an extra sub-context within a single culture. Being “German” is, for example, another social language, with its own grammar, akin to attending church versus going to a bar. And it, too, has multiple manifestations.

But I am not a child of Germany. Neither is German my native tongue. I may have long been a C2 speaker, and indeed, I live my life basically incognito unless I explicitly mention my background—no one really notices I’m not from around here. Yet no matter how good my language skills get, this mismatch still presents as an extra layer of abstraction. For the programmers out there: I do not feel like I’m running on “bare metal” like I do back home. The extra latency becomes cumulatively exhausting. I’m running in an interpreter, playing life on hard mode, when the opportunity to compile to machine code and switch to normal mode (or even easy) is right at my fingertips.

I previously described my circumstances as a purgatory, and this is an apt word to exemplify the cultural incongruencies. The word itself is frequently used—but only in English speaking cultures—in a looser sense to refer to a state of suffering that is almost always temporary, before a type of finalising “decision” relieves oneself of it. This is not so in other languages. Whilst the word and idea of a purgatory do exist in German (Fegefeuer), they don’t in this metaphorical sense. Many other types of analogies, turns of phrases, and cultural metaphors used in everyday life don't neatly map to one another (even though some do, thanks to the more remotely shared cultural and linguistic history).

I’ve come to believe that you might have to fully relinquish one cultural context for another in order to remove the extra cognitive burden. That would entail essentially “giving up” Australia once and for all to stay in Germany and focus on more specialised pursuits. Upon reflection, I think I really did do this for a few years, whilst I was still enthralled by the joy of learning a new language to proficiency, but its novelty soon faded.

When I use my computer, I always have two keyboard layouts active, depending on what I’m doing. One for writing German prose and messaging, and another with my “native” layout for everything else. I originally figured this two-pronged approach would make things easier, but really, it's constant chaos. Forever having one foot in each door is the same kind of chaos.

As such, it now seems obvious to me that I have to return to a single keyboard layout and go home. If I want to “relax into complexity,” then I must free up as much energy as possible, and in making this decision I can feel another entanglement of helplessness slowly unravel.

And this time, it’s a big one.