There is a habit South African expats may pick up in London. You set your laptop down on a table in a public co-working space, wander off to grab lunch from outside, come back twenty minutes later, and it is sitting exactly where you left it, untouched, because of course it is, because that is simply how things work there. After a while you stop registering it as a thing that could be otherwise - it becomes part of the texture of daily life in a city where most of what you worry about is, in the grand scheme of things, fairly small.

I lived in the UK for over a decade. I met my husband there, had two children there, built a career there, ran through its parks in the snow, watched the northern lights from my bedroom window, and ate more Christmas sandwiches from Pret than I will be admitting to in writing. By most reasonable measures, life was very good. And then last year we packed it all up and moved back to Johannesburg, which is not a city where you leave your laptop unattended, unless you are hoping to upgrade to the latest MacBook Pro M5 via an insurance payout.

Why leave when everything is fine

My husband had a fairly straightforward case to make: he missed his family, he was done with winters that arrive in October and linger until April, and he felt the pull of home in the way that people do when they have small children and start thinking about the people they want their kids to be raised around. That argument is hard to counter, particularly when you are pushing a pram through sideways rain down Oxford Street!

I felt all those things, though they weren't enough to bring me "home" - my additional motivation is slightly harder to say out loud without sounding like I'm narrating a TED talk about myself... I grew up in Johannesburg, where I learnt how to work, think and be curious about people and what they need in South Africa, and then, at exactly the point where those skills started to be worth something, I took them to the UK and spent the better part of a decade applying them to a British economy. It started to sit uncomfortably with me, the way an unanswered question does when you keep finding reasons to think about something else instead.

South Africa has no shortage of talented, driven people who care about fixing what is broken. What it has is a well-worn path out, and I had taken it, which put me in the fairly standard position of caring deeply about a place while doing nothing particularly useful for it, and eventually that stopped feeling like a reasonable arrangement.

What you give up

I want to be straightforward about this, because I have no interest in writing one of those relocation pieces that makes it sound like swapping London for Johannesburg is a simple lifestyle upgrade involving more sunshine and better avocados (which are two things that are both true and entirely beside the point). Johannesburg is not an easy city, and dressing it up as one would be both dishonest and rather insulting to the people who navigate its realities every day without the option of having chosen it. You think about which routes to drive, whether you should stop at the traffic light at night, whether the gate is locked, and a dozen other small calculations that London never asked of you. There is a mental load to living here that is confronting.

I also left behind a professional network built over more than a decade, proximity to some of the most interesting product and design work happening in the world, and the ability to fly to different countries quickly and cost-effectively. These are not nothing, and I knew that when we made this decision.

What I am still looking for

From a personal perspective the moment of clarity resulting from our choice came within days: watching my children with their grandparents, in a garden, in the sun, with space and warmth and people who love them close by.

The professional question is still open. I moved because I felt South Africa needed me more than London did, which is either a principled thing to believe or an embarrassingly grand way to talk about a personal decision, and I am aware it means very little unless I can find a way to make it true.

I do not regret the move for a single second. I moved because I believed there was work here worth doing. Finding it is the next part of the story.

Header image by Megan Ann https://www.meganannfamilies.com/