The Geography of Belonging: Living Between Multiple Homes

At 38, Amanda Molenaar faces a question common to the global nomad: how to choose between lives that all feel like home. After eight years of rotating through Buenos Aires, London, Brasilia, and Rio de Janeiro, the former diplomat has learned that when your heart is scattered globally, the anchor must be internal.

Molenaar’s formative years were defined by constant movement. A stint in South America at age 19 ignited a trajectory that led her through diverse corporate and diplomatic landscapes, forcing her to navigate office politics in London and represent the Netherlands in Portuguese. These experiences were more than just career milestones; they served as a forge for her identity, incorporating the loss of friends, the isolation of the pandemic, and the complexities of finding love across borders.

Today, as a life coach for other expats, Molenaar helps clients reconcile the friction of a life that refuses to fit into a single geographic container. While she currently resides in the Netherlands, she finds herself preparing for another departure, this time to Mexico City. For her, the struggle is no longer about finding a place to belong, but about managing the constant tension between the comfort of stability and the pull of new horizons. She has concluded that for those living across cultures, home is not a single coordinate on a map, but the sum of every place that has changed them.