Sometimes we distance ourselves from our families not because we have stopped loving them, but because the version of us they remember no longer has room for the person we have become.
We leave homes in which we learnt what was acceptable and what was not; what could be said and what should remain unspoken; how we ought to behave if we wanted to remain safely within the fold.
Years pass, and we begin to realise that some of what we once called our personality was simply the way we learnt to belong.
And when we begin to change, not everyone experiences that change as growth.
Some people do not miss us as we are. They miss the version of us that was easier for them to understand.
But there is another, less comfortable question:
Does changing always mean that we have become free?
Not necessarily.
Sometimes we escape one set of rules only to build an entire life in opposition to them. It feels like freedom because we are moving in the opposite direction. Yet the past is still choosing the direction; we have merely changed which way we face.
Freedom is not becoming the opposite of what other people wanted us to be.
Perhaps it begins when other people gradually stop being the reason for our choices — whether we obey them or defy them.
We may not always need to go home.
But at some point, we may need to ask ourselves:
Are we walking towards our own life… or are we still simply walking away from someone else's?