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Move away.

No, seriously. Move away from your hometown, even for a short time, and watch your mindset—and maybe your whole life— transform.

I’ve just moved back to my home country after living abroad for five years, and one of the biggest realisations I had during that time was how relative the values and “rules” I grew up with were.

I was telling someone this recently and she responded: “Yeah, it unf*cks your brainwashing.”

I couldn’t have put it better myself.

I grew up in a pretty conservative diaspora community that had a lot of subtle and not-so-subtle judgements and values about how women could behave. Back in the motherland, people had moved on from this conservatism in many ways, but the culture that I grew up with was frozen in the 50s and 60s.

The term “village mentality” was literal to my community as most of our grandparents were from rural European villages, including mine.

With that came the idea that other people’s opinions of you—what the “village” thought of you—was of huge importance. And to do something that would cause the “whole village to talk about you” held the threat of being ostracised, a fate almost worse than death.

It’s a shadow of most cultures how women have been policed if they dare to act outside of the fray.

This had trickled down into my generation where there was an unfortunate culture of gossiping and encouraging women to stay within a certain “good girl” box. Especially when it came to how she embodied her femininity, relationships, and god forbid, sensuality and sexuality.

After high school, I moved away to study in another city, but there was still this power I gave to the people in my hometown. I knew every Instagram post I made was being looked at and I felt afraid and encumbered by “what people would think” if I did something that fell outside of the good girl paradigm or the ideas people had of me.

When I arrived overseas, I was amazed by how different people’s values were. How they didn’t give a f*ck about some of the things I had been told were a no-no growing up.

Now, this is not to say I found a paradise for women that was 100 percent empowering and non-sexist (definitely not), but being in this new space and interacting with different people from around the world unf*cked my brainwashing on the limiting values from my hometown.

Looking at photos of myself before and after those five years, I look so different. Not just physically in how I now dress and present myself, but also in my energy and self-confidence from years of living on my own terms.

Moving away also showed me how I had the power to create my own chosen community, including the best of my hometown, and that I could find belonging within myself.

One of the most significant things I worked up to was removing anyone from my past on my social media who I hadn’t spoken to in over five years.

I had fallen into a habit of not posting anything at all on my social media, knowing that anything I did could become a topic of conversation. Maybe they didn’t care, but it’s been my experience that people are nosier than we think! And with Instagram, especially Stories, it was easy to see who was checking up on me.

This meant, however, that the people I posted my photos for—family and close friends around the world who I wanted to include in my life—didn’t get to see anything either.

I spent a lot of time soul searching about the immense and unreasonable power I had given people from my past. I asked myself:

“What door can they close that I want to walk through?”

“Do I care if people talk about me? Do I even value the things they would judge me over anymore?”

I realised with delight that I, too, did not give a f*ck anymore. In two batches, I removed people from my social media and felt this deep relief come over my body afterwards. I had turned my social media into a safe space for myself where I felt free from being “watched.”

Anybody who confronted me about taking them off my socials (and nobody did) would get a kind message about my new personal social media policy and how it was reserved for close people in my life and people I had shared business or interests with.

One of my close friends from the same community did not feel the same way. She had stayed in our hometown and within the community for most of her life and the idea of taking even the periphery of our old circle off her socials had her biting her nails.

I understand that not everyone is able to simply move away from their hometown—nor do they want to.

But here’s the thing: Unless we break free from limiting values and mindsets within our cultures, we’ll live our whole lives in a box not of our choosing. And with that comes resentment, drama, and feeling like we never got to truly explore ourselves and life.

Moving away, even for a short period of time, and immersing ourselves among new cultures and people is the fastest way to see how relative these values and mindsets are. We also get to try out new ways of being in these new spaces, free from the watching eyes of our original community.

And yet, I think it’s within our power to overcome restricting cultural values and stay in our hometown, as long as we purposefully find new people and spaces outside of “the Matrix” to engage with and conduct experiments of who and how we want to be. No matter how scary it might feel!

It’s about reclaiming the power we’ve given to others and creating a new path—not one where we have to renounce our hometown or cultures, but where we can transcend judgements and fears, live freely, and even show others and our origins a new way.

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