Home is Where the Identity Crisis Comes From

I moved back to Belfast in May 2021, after four years of living away. Since then, I’ve been slowly unpicking my own identity. I’ve been undergoing a forceful reimagination of myself, my community. I‘ve been reconsidering my own idea of what makes a home.

This, in many ways, comes with the territory of who I am. Anyone who's Northern Irish will understand the feeling of being born with a question in your mouth. Being Northern Irish means being gifted with a twisting perspective; living with an invisible border drawn down the length of your throat.

Being half Welsh and half Northern Irish means even more internal reflection. It means my accents collecting and changing vowels with the frequency of shells washing up to shore. It means my personal history being threaded unevenly between the rocks of the causeway and the rolling hills of Wales.

It means an absolute crisis whenever job applications ask for my nationality.

I was born at the foot of the Welsh valleys, in the same market town my dad’s side of the family have lived for almost their whole lives. I grew up by the curve of the River Lagan, nestled in amongst the red-brick streets of Belfast. Over the years, any direct sense of loyalty to either nationality has become stretched out and water clogged, fogged by a lifetime of plane rides across the water and cups of tea across kitchen tables.

Any personal perspective has been hung out to dry, left forgotten on the bridge across the English Channel that Boris will never build.

Country isn’t even the only split in my identity. My family from Belfast are also divided along sectarian lines; my grandparents were both Catholic and Protestant. Almost every part of myself is straddled across a border – my personhood warping and changing its shape almost constantly. Subsequently, I fail even the simplest of checkbox exercises.

I exist in a space that no one else does, twisting and turning in a landscape of my own design.

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My friends and I will sit getting high and having intense conversations about what it means to be the first generation born around the Good Friday agreement’s implementation. One of my friends will say something like: we have an obligation to use our education and perspective to engage with people on all sides of the community. We are the people who can help Belfast and Northern Ireland get better, in this post conflict society.

And, everyone there will nod and agree, strong in our assurance that we’re above it all. We’re enlightened, sociable.

Except for the fact I went to a Catholic secondary school, so all my friends have names spelled the Gaelic way and want a United Ireland. So, inevitably, at least one person every year will get absolutely steaming on Paddy’s Day and start shouting something incendiary at the English students attending the house party with us.

And isn’t it funny? The way I’ve never heard a bomb go off – but sometimes I can still taste the rubble left behind?

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I was asked recently at a literary event if I also wrote poetry. I said back: no, I write memoir mainly.

I’d just finished reading a book by author Jeannie Vanasco. It was a memoir, and within it she’d frequently referenced the fact she teaches other people to write memoir, mainly – so the word was at the forefront of my mind. Despite this, the second I labelled my own style of writing out loud, I wanted to snatch the words back and shove them under my feet. I wanted the sentence to be instantly out of sight and out of mind.

I felt embarrassed by the idea I thought myself important enough to have a memoir, even though I clearly do think myself important enough to have a memoir.

The thing about writing so much from your own perspective, is you become slightly unhinged from reality. Every moment, every second of my life becomes something to narrate back in the third person. I have become obsessed with the idea I can turn my feelings into writable, publicly consumable moments.

Grief; identity; fear; love; all of these aspects of myself have become nothing more than content to use. Tragedy is good for writing. Isolation is good for writing. I am good for writing.

I want to publish my writing online and recieve hundreds of comments on how amazing my way with words is. I want to be told how good I am repeatedly, only to continuously fail to accept the compliments.

My internal identity crisis is no longer something to be kept comfortably internal. Instead, it must be picked apart – spooled at my feet like a roll of thread. It is no longer enough to dread the nationality question on job applications – I need to point it out, make it public spectacle.

Now, everyone else must dread the nationality question too.

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I moved back to Belfast in May 2021, after four years of living away. Since then, I’ve been slowly unpicking my own identity. I’ve been undergoing a forceful reimagination of myself, my community. I‘ve been reconsidering my own idea of what makes a home.

Before, I would have told you that a home is where you live – a home is where you rest, where you spent most of your time.

Now, after lockdowns and loss, and eight months living in a house in Wales where the walls were wet and the carpets were green, I’ve re-evaluated. Home has nothing to do with where you exist. Home is where the people who love you are. Home is where you feel comfortable.

Home is where you stop the public performances, and you just exist.

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I’m blessed enough to have homes almost everywhere I go.

I am at home on the sofa in front of my dad’s fireplace, slouched on the broken-in leather, listening to the crackle of logs. I am at home on the floor of my flat, my dog’s paws on my lap and the smell of overpriced soy candles in the air. I am at home on the District Line, the familiar announcements over the Tannoys as the tube branches west to Richmond. I am at home here, and there, and –

I was born at the foot of the Welsh valleys, in the same market town my dad’s side of the family have lived for almost their whole lives. I grew up by the curve of the River Lagan, nestled in amongst the red-brick streets of Belfast. Over the years, any direct sense of loyalty to either side has become stretched out and water clogged, fogged by a lifetime of plane rides across the water and cups of tea across kitchen tables.

So, I have done the only thing I could do: I have made a home with myself.