Neither Here Nor There: What Happens When You Move 'Back' to Turkey and It Doesn't Fit Either

Deniz had been in Istanbul for eight months when she realized she was still an outsider. Not because anyone was unkind — quite the opposite. But she kept catching herself explaining things. Her accent in Turkish was just slightly off. She referenced American cultural touchstones in conversation and watched people's expressions flicker. She understood everything and belonged to nothing.

"I thought going to Turkey would feel like coming home," she says, sitting in a café in Chicago where she moved back to eighteen months later. "Instead, I felt like a tourist with a Turkish passport."

The Pull Toward Something Realer

For Turkish-Americans who grew up between two worlds, the fantasy of "going back" often starts forming in childhood. It's the summer trips to grandparents' houses in Ankara or Izmir. It's the food that tastes different there. It's the ease of being surrounded by people who look like you, speak like you, share your references without explanation.

As adults, especially in their late twenties and thirties, many Turkish-Americans find that pull intensifying. America can feel loud, transactional, isolating. The community they grew up in has scattered. And Turkey — even an idealized, half-remembered version of it — starts to feel like a solution.

Some go for practical reasons: job opportunities, lower cost of living in certain cities, a desire to reconnect with aging relatives. Others go for something harder to name — a feeling of wanting to be whole, to stop code-switching, to just be.

"I was exhausted by the hyphen," says Kerem, a 35-year-old journalist who spent three years in Istanbul before returning to Seattle. "Turkish-American. I wanted to drop one of those words and see what was left."

What They Found

The experiences vary enormously, and it's worth being honest about that range. Some Turkish-Americans who moved to Turkey have stayed. They built careers, found partners, put down roots, and describe the move as one of the best decisions of their lives. Istanbul especially — chaotic, beautiful, maddening, alive — has absorbed a meaningful community of diaspora returnees who have carved out a hybrid life that works.

But for many others, the reality was more complicated than the dream.

The Turkey they arrived in was not the Turkey they remembered from summer visits. It was a country navigating its own rapid changes — politically, economically, socially. The warmth was real. The complexity was also real. And the returnees themselves had changed more than they realized.

Deniz found that her American-formed instincts kept surfacing at inconvenient moments. She was uncomfortable with certain workplace hierarchies. She missed directness. She found the pace of social life — the long dinners, the unplanned drop-ins, the fluid sense of time — beautiful in theory and exhausting in practice when it was every day.

"I'd spent my whole life in New Jersey wishing I could be more Turkish," she says. "And then I got there and realized I was also very, very American."

The Loneliness of the In-Between

There's a specific loneliness that comes with being a returnee who doesn't quite return. You're not a foreigner — you speak the language, you know the culture, you have family there. But you're not fully local either. Your references are split. Your humor lands differently. You see things that locals take for granted, and you notice their absence in ways that mark you as someone who has lived elsewhere.

Kerem describes walking into rooms in Istanbul where he felt simultaneously over-qualified and under-equipped. "I could navigate the city perfectly. I knew which neighborhoods were changing, which restaurants were worth it. But then someone would make a reference to a TV show from 2003 that everyone watched and I had no idea what they were talking about. Those small moments added up."

Social belonging, it turns out, is built from thousands of tiny shared references. And when you've been away — or were never quite there to begin with — those gaps are surprisingly hard to bridge.

The Return to the Return

Some came back to the US. Some are still deciding. A few went back and forth more than once.

What's striking is that the ones who came back to America didn't come back defeated. They came back changed — and often, more at peace with the complexity of their identity than they'd been before they left.

"I stopped trying to find the place where I fully belong," says Deniz. "I started building it instead. Here, in Chicago. With other people who understand what it means to be between things."

That shift — from searching for a place to building a community — seems to be the real resolution for many in this group. The question of "where is home" gets replaced, slowly, with something more actionable: who makes you feel at home, and how do you stay close to them?

Redefining Home on Your Own Terms

There's a Turkish word — gurbet — that doesn't translate cleanly into English. It means something like "being far from home," but it carries an emotional weight that "homesick" doesn't quite capture. It's the ache of distance, the feeling of not-quite-belonging wherever you are.

For Turkish-Americans who've done this particular back-and-forth, gurbet takes on a new dimension. It's not just about geography. It's about identity. You can feel it in Turkey and you can feel it in America. And at some point, you realize that the feeling itself might be the most honest thing about you — proof that you contain more than one world, even when that's uncomfortable.

Kerem says he's stopped trying to resolve it. "I have a life in Seattle that I love. I go to Istanbul twice a year and I feel something there I don't feel anywhere else. Both things are true. I'm done picking."

Maybe that's the most honest ending this story gets: not a homecoming, but a making-peace. Not arrival, but acceptance. Two cultures, one person, and the quiet, hard-won decision to stop apologizing for being all of it.