Can You Miss a Place You Don’t Remember?

I sometimes miss places I barely remember.

This sounds strange because missing somewhere usually seems to require memories. You miss the house where you grew up, the street you walked down every day, the restaurant where your family always went. You can picture it, remember what it had the scent of, remember the people who were there.

But what happens when you were too young to remember properly?

Can you miss a place that exists mostly in other people’s stories, old photographs and the feeling you get when someone mentions it?

I think you can.

Growing up as an expat kid has made me think about this more than I expected. There are places I lived in when I was very young that I couldn’t describe to someone in any real detail. I don’t remember the layout of the house or what the streets looked like. If someone asked me to draw a picture of the place, I probably couldn’t.

And yet, sometimes I feel strangely attached to it.

Memory isn’t as simple as remembering

One reason this is interesting is that our memories from early childhood are not necessarily like photographs that we can access whenever we want. Most people experience what psychologists call childhood amnesia, meaning that memories from the first few years of life are often difficult or impossible to consciously recall later.

That doesn’t mean those experiences did not affect us.

We can forget the details of a place while still carrying something from the experience of being there. The routines, relationships and emotions connected to early experiences can become part of how we make sense of ourselves, even when we can’t consciously remember where they came from.

There is something strange about that.

A place can be part of your history without being part of your memory.

Sometimes I wonder whether certain places can feel familiar before you actually understand why. Maybe it isn’t that we remember everything. Maybe we remember fragments.

A smell.

A photograph.

A story someone told us so many times that it almost feels like our own memory.

A street we recognize because we’ve seen it in pictures.

Over time, all of these things can become mixed together.

The memories other people give us

This is the part I find most interesting.

When you are too young to remember a place yourself, other people become part of your memory.

Your parents tell you stories about the house you lived in. Someone shows you a photograph and explains what happened that day. You hear the same funny story about something you did as a child over and over again.

Eventually, you know the story so well that it feels like something you personally remember.

But technically, you don’t.

Psychologists have studied this idea of autobiographical memory and the way conversations with parents help children develop stories about their own past. We don’t build our sense of personal history completely on our own. Other people help us understand what happened to us and what those experiences mean.

I think this becomes especially interesting when you have moved countries.

If your childhood is spread across several places, some of those places might exist in your mind almost entirely through other people’s memories.

Your parents might remember the apartment.

You remember your parents talking about the apartment.

Those aren’t quite the same thing.

And yet both become part of your story.

A place can become part of your identity without feeling familiar.

This is where I think migration makes the question even more complicated.

If you grow up moving between countries, your relationship with places isn’t always based on how long you lived there. Sometimes a place where you spent only a few years can remain important, while somewhere you lived much longer might not feel particularly significant.

It can depend on what happened there.

Who you were.

Who you knew.

What your family was going through at the time.

And sometimes, simply how old you were.

There are places from childhood that I know are important because my family talks about them as important. Some photographs make me feel nostalgic even though I don’t actually remember taking them.

It makes me wonder what exactly nostalgia is.

Does it always have to come from our own memories?

Or can we feel nostalgic for a version of our life that we know mostly through stories?

Maybe nostalgia isn’t always about remembering a place exactly as it was. Sometimes it is about missing the feeling of knowing that a certain part of your life existed.

The strange feeling of returning

I think this is why going back to a place you lived as a child can be so strange.

You might recognize things that you didn’t know you remembered.

A building can look familiar even though you couldn’t have described it before. A smell or a street might suddenly feel important for reasons you can’t explain.

Or nothing might happen at all.

You might look around and think, I lived here?

The place can feel both recognizable and completely foreign.

I think that makes sense because the person returning isn’t the same person who left. The child who experienced the place and the teenager or adult looking at it years later don’t have the same memories, knowledge, or perspective.

You aren’t really returning to the same place either.

The city has changed. The people have changed. You have changed.

Sometimes what you’re actually looking for isn’t the place itself, but a form of yourself that existed there.

Maybe home is partly made from things we don’t remember.

This is one of the things I like about thinking about TCK identity through memory.

We often talk about home as somewhere we remember clearly. But for people who moved when they were very young, some of the places that contributed to our idea of home might be almost completely unreachable through memory.

And yet they can still matter.

Maybe home is made up of more than the places we can picture. It can come from family stories, photographs, traditions, smells, food, languages and small details that have followed us from one place to another.

Some of those things we remember ourselves.

Others were given to us.

I don’t think that makes them less real.

In fact, maybe one of the interesting things about growing up between places is realizing that your personal history isn’t entirely something you remember. It is also something that has been told to you, passed down to you, and reconstructed over time.

So, can you miss a place you don’t remember?

I think you can.

You might not miss the streets or the house itself. You might not even know exactly what you are missing. Maybe you are missing a period of your life, the people who were there, or simply the idea that there was a version of you who belonged to that place before you were old enough to question what belonging meant.

Maybe a place doesn’t have to exist clearly in your memory to have a place in your identity.

Sometimes we carry places without remembering exactly what they looked like.

And maybe that’s another strange thing about growing up between cultures: some of the places that made us who we are might be the ones we remember the least.