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I came home, but my body still kept a map of another city.
Whenever I take a stroll around Jakarta, my feet seem to remember the steps of another road. They remember Newcastle: the walk from High Bridge back to Jesmond, the run to Sandyford Building after I woke up late for a seminar, the soft summer air of a northern English city that was not quite coastal but close enough. My skin remembers the tiredness after work, and the quiet pride of returning to a life I had built myself.
I was born in Jakarta. It is home. It is the city where I got my first period and my first heartbreak, where I learned how to drive like I was racing Dom Toretto on the Antasari flyover, much to my mother’s horror.
Jakarta is the home that made me; Newcastle is the home I made.
There, no one knew my family, my childhood or the person I was expected to become. I worked in hospitality, often up to 50 hours a week, while pursuing a literature degree, maintaining both a fun social life alongside a chaotic love life, and making sure my little tuxedo cat was properly fed. I was tired often. I was lonely often. But I was also happy in a way I could not easily explain, because even the difficult parts of that life were mine. In that life, I learned how to be responsible for who I was becoming, and how to trust the person I was building when no one familiar was there to witness it.
But Newcastle was only my version of something more universal.
Not all departures require airports. Some happen quietly, inside the same city, the same house, the same life that once knew exactly where to place us. A person can be changed by work, love, friendship, class, solitude or adulthood itself, until the old mirror no longer reflects the whole picture.
And so the question is not whether we can love more than one home, but whether we can love every version of ourselves those homes have made, without asking one to disappear.
The first draft
There is comfort in being imagined by home. It means being held by people who remember our beginnings, who knew our stories before we knew how to tell them ourselves.
But sometimes, the people who knew us first become too loyal to the first draft. They keep believing that the manuscript written for us contains more truth than the one we later wrote ourselves.
So when we change, we do not always look grown to them. We look edited.
I thought about this while reading DW Winnicott’s idea of the “true self” and “false self.” I did not read those terms as a clean divide between honesty and fakery. Instead, what stayed with me was the idea that one version of our self learns to answer the world’s expectations, while another, a more private self waits underneath, trying to remain alive.
Maybe Jakarta was not my false self, and Newcastle was not my true one. That would be too easy, and unfair to both places.
I consider Jakarta as my first map: the place that taught me how to be known, loved, corrected and expected. Newcastle was where I began drawing new roads on top of it. Not because the old map was useless, but because it could no longer show me everywhere I needed to go.
The chosen self
The chosen self is difficult to explain because it can look, from the outside, like betrayal.
In Newcastle, I felt myself changing in ways that were visible. My accent shifted. My clothes became more intentional. I became more careful with how I entered rooms, how I spoke, how I carried myself. At first glance, it would be easy to call that insecurity, or worse, pretension.
But to me, it was not. It was awareness.
It was the slow realization that the world does not always meet us fairly, and that being proud of where I came from did not mean pretending the prejudices waiting for me did not exist. In a world where passport, skin color and accent are enough for some people to define you, I learned that prejudice did not always shout.
Sometimes, it smiled and asked where I was really from.
I never stopped being Indonesian. But I learned that roots need translation when replanted in unfamiliar soil. The chosen self, for me, was not a version that detached itself from its origin. It was the version whose roots learned how to take hold in new surroundings. It was the version that changed shape without changing its heart.
We do not need to go abroad to create our chosen selves. My friend Arindryo, 24, offered a more common version of this, recognizing that his way of speaking, behaving and responding to others had changed with age and maturity. “Even when the environment does not change,” he told me, “the self can still be sharpened through experience and the personal desire to change.”
His answer stayed with me because it collapsed the distance I had been writing about. The self can move even when the address does not.
Perhaps this is where the guilt begins, when the life we build starts to look unfamiliar to the people who knew us first.
The guilt of becoming different
No one warns you that becoming a new self can make you feel rude.
Not because you’ve done anything wrong, but because your life has started molding into shape that no longer bends as easily around everyone else’s comfort. You want to tell the truth about who you are now, but you also know that truth may feel like distance to people who remember you smaller.
So you translate yourself again, this time not for a foreign room, but for home.
This discomfort does not stop at the family table. It exists in the wider culture too, though Indonesia rarely admits it plainly. There is a familiar script: study hard, go far, become excellent, make everyone proud. The child who leaves to learn is celebrated, as long as the knowledge returns politely. As long as it does not ask too many questions. As long as it does not disturb the old furniture.
But when the version that returns is sharper, more direct, or less willing to shrink itself back into the old room, that pride can quickly turn to suspicion. Too westernized. Too idealistic. Too ambitious. Too difficult to control.
Clara, 23, felt that after returning from Hungary. Studying in Bandung had already given her a first taste of distance, but Hungary gave her the pause to meet herself more honestly. Coming home to Jakarta was not a clean return to the self she had left behind. It felt closer to reintroduction.
“It makes you dizzy,” she told me. “You can’t recognize your surroundings anymore. I couldn’t recognize myself either. It is hard to explain unless you feel it, but I felt out of place.”
Another close friend of mine, Angel, 23, understood the same tension throughout her career. Modeling had taken her through different countries and different versions of herself, but she did not describe those versions as separate strangers. “My core stayed the same,” she told me, “but every place brought out a different version of me.”
Maybe that is the strange labor of returning: having to introduce yourself again to a place that thinks it already knows you. It is not only us who need time to readjust to home. Home, too, needs time to recognize the person standing in front of it now. Once we have changed, our relationship with the place that wrote our first draft changes too.
Returning and carrying both
Coming home should not have to mean going backward.
I cannot return to the version of myself Jakarta remembers most easily. I can love her. I can understand her. I can even miss how simple it was to be her. But I cannot become her again without betraying everything I survived after her.
That is the honest answer I have now. We do not have to choose one self and bury the other. Our first draft is not childish just because it came earlier. The chosen self is not fake just because it had to adapt. Both are real. Both cost something. Both taught me how to live.
Clara understood that multiplicity did not have to mean fracture. Her different selves made her feel “more complete,” “like a richer expression” of herself. Angel put it more gently: “Home, for me, is where my ‘comfort people’ are.” Maybe “comfort people” are the ones who do not ask us to perform the oldest version of ourselves just to prove we still belong.
Maybe the map of a divided heart is only confusing when we mistake every border for a wound. But some lines are not there to split us apart. Some are routes. Some are crossings. Some are proof that we became more than one version and lived to carry them all.
