Driving back “home” to Orange for Christmas, I felt this strange blend of nostalgia, affection, and a quiet sense of dislocation.

The streets are familiar. The same pubs, the same corner shops, the same footpaths cracking in all the same places. A few new cafés have appeared, a couple of shiny developments on the edge of town, but underneath it all, it still feels like the place I left behind.

Or maybe it’s not that the town hasn’t changed.
Maybe it’s that I have, in ways that don’t quite fit there anymore.

I left Orange in 2009. Moved to Sydney in 2012. And somewhere in between, the version of me who belonged there stopped existing.

Coming Home for Christmas Hits Different

There’s something about Christmas that makes all of this feel louder.
Maybe it’s the rituals. The routines. The unspoken expectations.

I walk into my parents’ house, not the one I grew up in, but the one they moved into long after I’d already left, and there’s this strange disconnect. The decorations are familiar because they’ve been carried from home to home, but the walls aren’t. The layout isn’t. Even the smell is different.

It’s a Christmas that feels like mine, but in a space that doesn’t.

And that extra layer (the house not being my childhood home) reminds me even more of how far I’ve drifted from the boy who once lived here. It’s familiar, but not quite. Comforting, but slightly foreign. Like stepping into a memory that doesn’t fully belong to you anymore.

The Town That Stood Still (Or Maybe I Just Outran It)

Orange has changed cosmetically, new shops, new signage, new subdivisions… but the bones feel the same. Like an old song rearranged, but never re-written.

And I sometimes catch myself wondering what that means for the people who stayed.

Some of the people I went to school with are still there, working the same jobs they had nearly twenty years ago. Not because they failed to leave, but because staying made sense for them. They’ve built steady, grounded lives there. Families. Routines. Roots.

Then there are my nieces, both in their early twenties now. One already has a house. An almost two-year-old. Real stability. Real adulthood. All built on the same streets where I once stood dreaming of something bigger, without really knowing what “bigger” meant.

They’re creating their own futures in the town that raised me, and I find myself wondering what that will look like for them in twenty years.
Will they crave something else?
Or will they find peace in a steadiness I once mistook for stagnation?

Growth in Opposite Directions

I’ve changed, that part’s undeniable.
The way I speak, the way I dress, the way I think, even the pace at which I exist… they’re the outcomes of a city that demands movement. Change. Reinvention.

So when I come home now, it feels like I’m stepping into a place built for another version of me.
A version that felt smaller, more contained, more willing to fit.
A version I outgrew without realising it.

And yet, I don’t feel superior for leaving.
If anything, I feel… tender about it.

Because there’s something deeply admirable about the people who stayed, and the lives they’ve built with certainty and intention. Sometimes I even envy the simplicity of that belonging. The kind that doesn’t require you to prove yourself over and over again.

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The older I get, the more I realise that growth doesn’t make you better than the people who stayed. It just means your story needed a different setting.

Orange raised me. Sydney shaped me.
And maybe that’s exactly how it was meant to be.

But every Christmas, when I pack the car and drive away, I take one last look out the window and think:

I wonder if the version of me who once belonged here would recognise the man I’ve become, and I wonder which one of us would be more surprised.