There is a particular kind of affection reserved for people who move.
For those who live between places. We’re often met with curiosity, admiration, even. A sense of intrigue. Our lives look full, textured, in motion. We are asked where we’re from, where we’re going, what we’ve seen.
This attention can feel like affection. Sometimes it actually is.
But it isn’t the same thing as being held.
Lately I’ve been thinking about the difference between being interesting and being chosen, not only in love, but in the quieter, everyday ways we decide who belongs.
Between being invited in and being made room for. Between warmth and continuity.
And because I’m a photographer, my mind keeps returning to the frame.
The frame is a decision: what we keep, what we leave, what we’re willing to stay with.
Who gets to enter it. Who is allowed to remain.
Who is looked at with fascination, and who is looked at with care.
Who becomes a passing figure, and who becomes part of the story.
Living away from one’s native home complicates this. Not dramatically. Quietly. In ways that don’t announce themselves at first.
You learn how to arrive lightly. How not to take up too much space. How to make yourself legible in rooms where your history isn’t shared, your language isn’t spoken, your jokes aren’t necessarily funny.
None of this makes one less capable of love or belonging. But it can shape the terms under which closeness is offered and the assumptions placed on you before you’ve even spoken.
Photography has taught me a lot about this.
The photographer is often welcomed as presence, not permanence. Invited into moments. Trusted with proximity. Allowed to witness. But not always imagined as someone who stays once the picture is made.
We enter with a camera and people open a door: for an hour, for an afternoon, for a day. We are given access and then we leave. Sometimes gently. Sometimes abruptly. Sometimes with gratitude. Sometimes with the sense that we were always meant to be temporary.
In that way, the photographer becomes a kind of moving figure too, inside other people’s lives, but not quite of them.
Movement is mistaken for restlessness. Attention is mistaken for availability. Independence is mistaken for a lack of need.
The very qualities that make a life in motion look expansive can also make it easier for others to keep you at a safe distance. Not out of cruelty, perhaps out of habit. Out of the way we’ve learnt to enjoy people, places, even stories, without having to carry anything with us once we leave.
And yet: photographs are evidence of carrying. They remain.
A photograph holds what the moment couldn’t hold. It insists that something happened. That someone stood here. That light fell a certain way. That an encounter left a trace.
But a photograph also reveals something else: how quickly we confuse a brief intimacy with a lasting one. How easy it is to step into a frame and how rare it is to remain.
When you live away from where you were formed, intimacy doesn’t always arrive into a stable container. It arrives into borrowed rooms. Shared shelves. Temporary keys. Stories that have to be explained, not remembered together.
You become skilled at beginnings.
Less practised at being witnessed over time.
Not because you don’t want that kind of witness, but because the conditions for it are harder to build. They require time. Patience. A willingness to stay present through the ordinary days, when life is not “interesting”, but just lived.
This is where the craft and the emotional life begin to overlap.
A single photograph can be compelling because it’s intense: a flash, a gesture, a perfect alignment of emotions. But the deeper kind of seeing often asks for duration: returning, staying long enough for the awkwardness to soften, for the ordinary to become visible, for something true to settle.
Staying changes what the camera can see.
I don’t think this is about fault. It’s about how easily we confuse fascination with commitment. How we admire a life in motion, a person in motion, without always wanting to share the quieter labour of continuity.
It’s easier to visit than to build. Easier to be moved than to be responsible for what that movement asks of us.
And I don’t believe those of us who live between places are less loveable or less capable of belonging.
But I do think we are sometimes read as temporary, as if movement is a warning rather than a rhythm. As if leaving once means leaving again. As if a person with more than one home must be missing something, rather than carrying more than one truth.
Sometimes love falters not because of distance or difference, but because staying asks for a steadiness that curiosity alone can’t provide.
And perhaps that’s the real geography here: not the map between countries, but the line between being welcomed and being held. Between entering the frame and being allowed to remain in it. Between the thrill of proximity and the quieter labour of building something that can withstand time.
Not every connection is meant to last. We meet for a season, a reason, a lifetime… or something in between.
Some of us carry our sense of home with us. That doesn’t make us untethered. It means we’ve learnt how to build continuity out of fragments. How to return, even when the coordinates change, and how to stay faithful to what matters, even when the geography keeps shifting.
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A song for this piece:
Symphony 6: Fair Thee Well & The Requiem Mix, Emily Wells
Listen on Spotify