You Can’t Live Everywhere: What Comes After the Plot Collapses
When motion replaces meaning, is rhythm the only way to stay whole?
It started with the napkin.
White, creased, stained with tomato oil. The kind of napkin you only get in places that serve soup in paper cups and wine in tumblers. I found it months later in a zipped pocket I didn’t remember using. The handwriting was mine. Blue ink, slightly smudged: “Breakfast here next time.”
I stared at it for a long time, trying to remember where “here” was.
Brussels, maybe. Or Belgrade. Somewhere between the two. I had been in both that spring, living out of a suitcase I no longer bothered to unpack properly. I moved too often to notice where I was. I must have liked the restaurant. I must have meant to return. But even now, I couldn’t tell you which city the napkin belonged to. Only that it didn’t belong to me anymore.
There were twelve apartments across ten countries and three continents that year. All of them had the same white sheets, the same blonde wood dining tables, the same IKEA floor lamps. I bought groceries I didn’t finish. Took photos of coffee cups beside my laptop—always the same angle, always the same performance of routine.
When I scroll back through those photos now, they know where I was. They tell me the date, the hour, even the weather. But they don’t give me back the memory. I look at them the way I look at someone else’s holiday album: vaguely interested, entirely disconnected.
There was a panic attack in Prague. That’s vivid. It happened in a coworking space, on a Wednesday afternoon. I hadn’t spoken to another person yet that day. I was sitting at a desk, answering emails, hitting my deadlines. Everything was normal. But suddenly, I couldn’t breathe.
I left my laptop open and sat on the curb outside, waiting for the tightness in my chest to pass. It didn’t feel like anxiety. It felt like the moment a computer crashes and takes your unsaved work with it. Like some part of me had stopped syncing.
People think collapse is dramatic. That it comes all at once, with a job loss, a breakup, a plane crash, a war. But narrative collapse isn’t like that. It arrives slowly. You start treating places like layovers. You delete the journalling app you used to open every morning. You stop calling things by name—city, month, home—because none of the language feels accurate, and the corrections are exhausting.
The calendar fills up. But time doesn’t stick.
The year I turned thirty, someone asked where I’d been the year before. Not metaphorically—just practically. What cities, what countries, what time zones. I tried to answer. A list of places. A timeline. But I couldn’t remember the order. Was I in Berlin before Lisbon? Did I fly to Istanbul from Budapest or from Athens? The places blurred together, and the stories that once connected them had gone missing.
I knew I’d taken the flights. I could find the receipts. But the feeling of those weeks—the texture of them—was gone.
When the structures that used to confirm your existence fall away—office buildings, familiar celebrations, people who wave when you pass—you don’t become freer. You become harder to read. Illegible, even to yourself.
The Airbnb host in Budapest thought I was a travel influencer. The customs agent in Lisbon asked where I lived, and I thought, “online,” but said something else. A friend in Berlin told me I was living the dream. I nodded, because explaining would have taken too long.
It looked like a life. It moved like a life. But when I tried to articulate it, all I could produce was a list.
You Can’t Be Everywhere
At first, I liked how it sounded: “I live nowhere. I belong everywhere.” It felt like a sleek response to the questions that always came:
Where are you based?
What do you do?
How long are you staying?
Why are you here?
The questions were simple, reasonable. But over time, they started to feel like traps. Not because they were hostile, but because I didn’t have real answers. So I learned to answer them gracefully. Quickly. Neatly. Like others I met on the road did, too.
We announced ourselves with pride at first, with a kind of elegance. The fluid self. The borderless self. Identity as something you could remix. No fixed address, no fixed role, no fixed story. You could become whoever the place needed you to be. Whoever you needed to be. But who were you, actually?
Motion, I learned, is not narrative. Fragments, while real, are not the same as coherence.
I lost entire chapters. Moments that should have mattered. People who had names, but no weight. I’d run into someone at a conference and smile like we were old friends, only to realise I didn’t know the last time we met. What city. What year. What version of myself I had been back then.
I began describing myself in bullet points instead of sentences. Writer. Strategist. Nomad. Global citizen. Geographically restless.
I was still pitching. Still performing. Still playing the game. But the gap between what I was saying and what I felt was growing. The performance held. The self behind it became harder to reach.
Philosopher Paul Ricoeur wrote that the self is made through story. Not a fixed thing, but an unfolding—stitched together by time, memory, retelling. When you stop telling the story, the self begins to fade.
The promise of nomadic life is escape from structure—career ladders, monogamy, mortgages. And it works. But with the scaffolding gone, I found myself unable to speak. I’d run from the script, despite having nothing to replace it.
Performing a Life That Isn’t Yours
I had every tool to find myself. I still got lost. When I lost the story, I reached for the image instead.
The water bottle that showed up in my photos again and again: dented steel, always placed beside my laptop like it belonged in the frame. I don’t remember where I bought it, or when I left it behind. But for a while, it was a prop that grounded me. Something to prove I was still living a version of a life that made sense.
There’s an aesthetic to borderless living. Matte filters. Mid-century furniture. MacBooks on rustic tables. A sea of brand stickers—crypto wallets, project management apps, AI startups—each one a kind of passport stamped on a screen. I wasn’t documenting my experience. I was curating it. We didn’t just travel—we themed ourselves. We arranged ourselves into pleasing frames, hoping they would reveal something we could no longer reach directly.
I started five essays in five different countries. Each time, the page was blank by day three. My voice had grown faint. I couldn’t hold it steady long enough to say what I meant. Everywhere looked like everywhere else. Linens, wood, lighting. Every self started to look like every other. The cities were different. The cafes were different. The words never found ground.
I didn’t stop writing. But I was narrating for an invisible audience. The more I performed, the further I drifted from myself.
The cafes were full of freelancers and founders and online creators. But the conversations looped—the same visa hacks, the same productivity tools, the same vague ambitions. We were not building meaning. We were creating an internet trend. A meme; the sovereign individual made photo-realistic.
The documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis talks about systems that simulate motion but go nowhere. Aesthetics can work the same way. The surface keeps shifting, but underneath, nothing changes. You’re just maintaining the appearance of a self. A set of references. A polished loop.
It looks like clarity. But it’s camouflage.
Learning to Stay Still
Rootedness used to be an address. A passport. A family name. It meant staying. It meant belonging to a place that also claimed you.
But in the aftermath of motion, rootedness starts to mean something else. Not a return to tradition. Not a performance of permanence. A method. A rhythm. A way of being with time.
I started buying groceries instead of eating out. Not always—but often enough to know which store stocked the good yoghurt, which checkout lines moved fastest, which vegetables looked tired on Tuesdays.
There was a room I decided to repaint. I knew I’d still be living there next season. That was new. It was the first time in years I’d imagined a future in a place I was already in.
Someone at the corner café remembered my name. Not because I tipped well or stayed long, but because I kept showing up. The sound of it—unprompted, casual—landed somewhere deeper than I expected.
I watched the seasons change from the same window.
Slowly, a kind of rhythm emerged. Not imposed from the outside. Not declared in a bio. Built from inside the days themselves.
I used to think meaning came from momentum. That if I kept moving, I’d find the version of myself that finally made sense. But stories don’t always arrive in order. Sometimes they arrive through the ordinary, repeated until it holds.
Stillness didn’t feel peaceful at first. It felt like failure. Like standing still while everyone else passed you by. Each morning, I pick up a sentence I started the day before. Not to finish it. Just to stay inside it a little longer.
I never expected stillness to feel like becoming.
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