In the summer of 2017 I went to Poland for a week and a half to visit my family. I have lived in England for eleven years so whenever I go to Poland, I get a cultural shock. It feels so different to England, to London, a place that I have called home for years. Whenever I go back I feel like I don’t belong.

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I was born in Elbląg and for the first seven years of my life I lived there. On this trip I decided to see how it has changed, but the only thing that changed are the trees.

 

The neighbourhood school hasn’t been refurbished and the walls of the communist built apartment blocks haven’t been painted. It is 2018 but whenever I go back I feel like it’s still the early 2000s, except I am no longer a child and the kiosks no longer full of newspapers.

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I sometimes feel I am stuck in an in-between. I live in between the modernity of London and the nostalgia of my childhood home. None of them feel like I fully belong, as if I am no longer Polish but also as if I don’t qualify to be British.