Home is where…?
Six years ago, Megan Nolan headed to London, a move that would lead her t o discover many things about herself and her f eelings about Ireland, and what home really means. Here, she writes about what brought her to the UK, how her hometown of Waterford evokes different emotions to Dublin, and
what it means t o belong to more than one plac e.
The past year has been a tough one for me, as it has for everyone. Part of that is how direly I miss Ireland.
All this enforced time away is making me reframe the idea of home. I’ve lived in London for nearly six years now, but I was often back home or away working in other foreign countries for a few months at a time. I didn’t feel truly settled, truly committed to it as a permanent location. Now, I undeniably live here and only here. I’ve just signed a lease, which will last for two years. I’ve finally had to accept that this is where I am. Until now, my flightiness allowed me to think of Ireland as home always, home first, and it is a strange feeling to recalibrate that instinct, to try to let myself have not one place that I ultimately belong, but two.
When I left Ireland, it wasn’t with any plan to make a success of myself. It was a terrible idea, what I did, in retrospect. You’d have to advise any daft 24-year-old against it, but then that fact gets complicated by the fact it turned out alright in the end. I would have denied it at the time, but I mostly came to London because I was in love with someone. The feelings I had for him were so resilient and potent that although we weren’t even really seeing each other anymore by the time
I was departing, the spirit of it carried me over anyway. Whatever way I had loved him had changed me and made me feel reckless and brave and willing to hurl myself about a bit just to see what might happen.
There was something about him and the conversations we had that made me feel willing to get hurt if it meant that something exciting might happen too. I didn’t necessarily expect that London would be better or happier or more productive than Dublin had been for me, more I expected it to be difficult and strange and overwhelming, and I was ready to be overwhelmed.
Sometimes the harshness and the pace of things here, the relentless cost and the incessant travel, became too much for me and I collapsed beneath it, but collapse was only ever brief because that was all you could allow yourself. There was something in the frantic, unforgiving energy of it which, it turned out, was good for me. I am a lazy, lazy person. If left to my own devices, I would never get anything done at all, and the fact I had all my
choice removed from the matter of working and living seemed to simplify things for me, and clarify whatever vague ambitions I had come over with.
While I was still in the first few years trying to get something going, some kind of scrappy career and life, it was sometimes painful to return to Ireland. When
I had moved, my ex had reassured me by saying how close I would still be to Dublin, and to Waterford, where I’m from. I could still visit, still see my friends, could be home in the space of an afternoon even in an unforeseen emergency. While this was of course true, it didn’t feel true. In London, as soon as I was in the Gatwick train station calculating my journey back South East, I felt as untethered from home as I did anywhere in the world, the number of miles and the frequency of flights no great balm to the fact that I lived here now, that I was not a character in the situations of Dublin any longer.
I visited home a few times a year, but I rarely paused long in Dublin. I felt uncomfortable, and annoyed at my own discomfort. I had lived there for seven years after all, so why did I still feel sheepish arriving on the Aircoach, looking around me furtively and hoping not to bump into acquaintances? I hurried down O’Connell Street and onto the quays, where a bus would take me all the way home, straight to Waterford. There, I did not experience the same queasy sense of longing and anger I felt in Dublin. Waterford was what I needed it to be, which was outside of time and of the vagaries of how successfully I was managing the loose threads of my London life (how much money I was short of rent, what person I was sort-of-seeing). It was a place of total relief, where I would often sleep for 13 hours at a time and go to the same pub-café I’d been going to with my parents since I was an infant and feel completely safe.
One complicating factor was that I found my writing career only once I moved away from Dublin – but the difference was primarily psychological, not to do with superior opportunities. In Dublin, after a difficult start into my adulthood, I had – fairly happily – resigned myself to a life in which the greatest aspirations were a permanent job and a nice flat and a boyfriend. Nobody told me that I shouldn’t bother trying for anything else, or that I couldn’t be a writer. In fact, there were plenty of supportive, encouraging friends and mentors who told me the opposite. It was just my mental cross to bear. It felt as though I had only barely escaped total self-destruction in my earlier years, and now I had to pay back that luck by living in a small and contained way. I needed something bracing to shock me out of my weary complacency, and between the boyfriend, the break-up and the move, I got one. It was never Dublin’s fault, I know that now.
I think I was angry with Dublin until recently for not becoming my long-term, adult home. It hadn’t worked out, didn’t keep the promise I had blithely assumed it was making to me when I arrived full of hope at the age of 18. Living through 2020 has softened some of that sourness I’ve felt, because
I do know where my adult home is, finally. For all its miseries and expenses, it’s London. London is where my life is, where I want to live. This became clear in 2020 when I was stranded during the first lockdown back home in my mother’s house. Although it was safer to remain in a low density population and without the financial burden of renting a new place alone, I felt a forceful and irrepressible need to return to London.
In the summer, I tried to take what solace I could from the new, unavoidable permanence of my being here, and was surprised to find that there was plenty. Against all odds, I had the most beautiful season. I was living alone for the first time since I had arrived five years before, and I set myself up in my new neighbourhood, Camberwell, with determined pleasure. I found the best bakery and the best spot in the tucked away gardens to sit and read on weekend mornings. I established a route for a daily walk, which would take me past the fancy butchers and the flower shop. When the restrictions eased, I drank tepid fizzy wine in Peckham Rye with my friends, and we constructed makeshift birthday parties for one another as best we could, tying balloons to park benches. I dated. I stayed out late and kissed some guy I never saw again in a playground and walked home beaming and laughing along to Billy Joel. It’s not the place I moved for an ex anymore, or somewhere I stay in between trips. It was an unlikely, imperfectly perfect summer, and somehow it made London feel fully mine. I knew the winter would come, and more lockdowns, and I knew I would stay for those too. I’m here for the long haul, bright or dark, inside or out.