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Earlier this summer, I had to move back in with my parents for a few months. I’ve pretty much spent the whole summer rehashing the story to anyone who will listen, but to avoid any new, libel-based conflict, I won’t commit anything too specific to print. I was living with my brother in the house that he owns, and let’s just say that the informality of our sibling relationship didn’t sit well with the supposed formality of a tenant-landlord relationship. After discovering a friend had a free room for a few weeks, I took my cue and left, haphazardly packing two suitcases with enough clothes and books to get me through an unknown period of time.
Initially feeling energized by my decision—I felt light and free as the Uber whizzed me through London into a new chapter of life—the adrenaline quickly curdled in my stomach. I felt untethered. Braced. I couldn’t bring my cat with me, the cat I had bought precisely so I would feel more settled and rooted. I didn’t have my desk and my usual workspace. Feeling uncertain in my surroundings, I didn’t have the emotional bandwidth to exercise or cook proper meals. After a miserable day spent in the British Library, I called my mum. I wanted to come home.
While I felt relieved when I arrived—my mum and I drank a cup of tea in the garden as the day cooled—I also felt a hot sense of shame. I was running home. Why did I always do this? Why couldn’t I work things out myself—stick it out, see it through, stand on my own two feet? All the world was out there living adult lives, and here I was, aged 28, jumping on the first train home when things became too much. I spent the next two months sleeping in my old bed with the princess pink headboard I thought I’d grown out of.
Something changed for me this summer, however, and I began to see my situation in a more positive light. It started while I was reading Lazy City, a novel by Rachel Connolly. In it, the protagonist, Erin, has returned to her hometown of Belfast from London after the sudden death of a best friend leaves her unable to cope. Her mother, however, fails to provide the grieving Erin with a loving environment, instead fostering one that is emotionally and physically unsafe. (“I follow her up the stairs and trip over the same raggedy bit of carpet that has been tripping us both up for over a decade,” she writes.) Erin moves out to become an au pair for a rich family with an astroturf lawn. Their house is nice, but it is not really a home. Erin identifies with a stray cat.
On her decision to deny Erin a stable home, Connolly explains to me that “moving back with your parents” is a privilege so widespread now that we don’t even tend to identify it as such. “It’s a bit of a thing at the minute, and it’s not class-based at all… But there’s an expectation that you can rely on your family,” Connolly tells me. “There’s an expectation that if things screw up, you can go back and stay with your parents. But Erin does not have access to that. There isn’t a refuge that she can run off to. She can’t blow up the place and go and sleep somewhere for like six months.” Compare Erin with Ottessa Moshfegh’s orphaned, uber-rich heroine in My Year of Rest and Relaxation. When the latter blows up her life, she retreats to the apartment she owns on the Upper East Side and, with the help of unemployment benefits, her inheritance, and a lot of prescription pills, literally goes to sleep for 12 months.
Reframing moving home as a non-class-based privilege allowed me to reevaluate what I had—a material security blanket—but also what a character like Moshfegh’s unnamed heroine, despite having all the money in the world, does not: supportive parental figures who provide space for my emotions, meaning I don’t have to turn them maladaptively inwards. “When it comes to moving home, it’s all about your point of view,” confirms Karen Gail Lewis, a family and sibling therapist based in New York. “Is it because you feel like you’re a failure and can’t manage elsewhere? That’s not a good reason. Or is it because you find your parents supportive, and it’s great to have this safety net under you while you figure out what’s next? Your perspective makes a lot of difference.”
As a young person, moving home is nothing unusual. Most people I know—whether due to job insecurity, housing issues, or because they need extra emotional support—have gone home at some point or another. So why does the feeling of shame persist? “It comes from the 1970s and the idea that we need to be independent,” explains Lewis. Yet such notions of independence are a fallacy. In the United Kingdom, rigorous individualism was a value espoused by Margaret Thatcher, who deregulated markets and eroded social housing with the “right to buy” scheme. Without access to affordable social housing, young people today have no choice but to fall back on their parents, particularly in times of trouble. “I gave this same interview in 2008 when the markets crashed,” Lewis tells me. “People had no other choice—they couldn’t find jobs.” Today, in light of the cost-of-living crisis, a recent study has shown that 17% of young people in the UK have or are planning to move back in with their parents. (An equivalent study in the United States showed that some 45% of people between 18 and 29 are currently living at home.)
The sheer number of people who are moving or have moved home suggests the “problem” is not with us, but with the system at large. (In Willful Disregard, a Swedish “sad girl” book I read recently, the lovesick protagonist breaks up with her boyfriend and the housing department offers her an apartment, a cute studio which looks out onto a courtyard—a fantastical concept for those of us in London.) “Generation Boomerang” discourse is surrounded by a cultural anxiety that as a generation we are more childish than our boomer parents, that we have “failed to launch,” that we are spongers, drifters. Yet, as our parents responded to affordable housing by buying it, we are merely responding to the situation we find ourselves in. Moving home, if you are able, is an obvious option in a relentless economic climate that does not allow for forms of stopping.
The psychoanalyst Donald Woods Winnicott writes in Home Is Where We Start From that, as infants, we need “an environment that holds the baby well enough [...] The result is a continuity of existence that becomes a sense of existing, a sense of self, and eventually results in autonomy.” The same might apply for us immature 20- and 30-somethings. When the “real” world is too demanding, moving home somewhere loving and supportive acts as a transitional zone that will eventually lead us towards maturity (particularly if it involves saving money). “It can be a very grown-up, forward way of thinking. It’s a step towards independence,” agrees Lewis.
Being at home can also be a chance to address unresolved issues, “to emotionally clean up,” as Lewis describes it. As a twin and the youngest of four children, I personally found the experience reparative, as it allowed me to receive the kind of “only child” attention I always craved. My parental bonds feel stronger, and as a result I do feel more confident, and less flappable now that I am back in London. It is akin to what psychologist John Bowlby calls the “dependency paradox”—that if we feel our base is secure, that we can depend on it, we are more likely to live our lives autonomously, as the great adventure it is. And I feel ready to live it; I just had to go home for what I needed first.