I have been lucky enough to travel far and see a little corner of the world while pursuing my university degree. I take this as more than just a small privilege. But privilege always asks for something in return. My sacrifice has been distance. Unfortunately, I have been somewhat unlucky: I have not been able to travel back home for the duration of my degree because of circumstances beyond my control, hence the visceral homesickness. My words cannot fully encapsulate the grief that has come with this distance. The bittersweet duality of achieving your dreams, having to uproot from your homeland and reroot in foreign soil. Many have experienced this. I cannot say I am unique, but it is spoken about is hush tones, maybe because of the guilt of what we left behind, maybe because loving two places at once can sometimes feel like self-betrayal. I cannot say, I cannot speak beyond what my experience has dealt me. But I know for sure that it is sometimes hard to understand how to feel when your success costs you closeness. Loving from afar is sharp. It cuts quietly. Birthdays are experienced through screens. Milestones are celebrated in frozen time, through photographs we cannot embrace. You learn to love in fragments, voice notes, time differences and memories. You grieve not only the home you left, but the version that existed there. Known without explanation. Held without asking. Understood without words.

I have always felt things intensely, which is one of the things I both love and loathe about myself. It is my (sometimes burdensome) blessing. I have never known moderation in feeling; joy doubles itself, coming in tidal waves flooding every synapse at every nerve, sadness comes as viciously, equally and oppositely. All other feelings are the same. When I moved from Uganda, at nineteen, I did not know what name to give the feeling that was overwhelming me; I couldn’t understand its might either. It engulfed me all the same, and I was left with half my sanity to muster the energy to actually do my degree, go to work, make new friends and maintain old friendships, meet myself where I am, and extend myself for whatever reason I needed to. However, these are stories for some other day. I want to talk about love. How love is the way must evolve to survive.

Love is how I have learned to survive, because it has taught me to remain whole in the absence of what I miss most. When I cannot be physically present with the people who shaped me, love becomes memory, imagination, and endurance. It transforms distance into something bearable and loss into something meaningful. Instead of allowing separation to harden me, love teaches me to stay open, to keep hoping, to keep remembering, and to keep believing that connection does not disappear simply because space exists. In this way, love does not weaken me. It sustains me.

Because I cannot go home, I have learned to build worlds in my mind. Walk through the halls mustered by the will to survive. When the grief of distance becomes too heavy, I lie in memory. When the world feels unfamiliar, I return to the place where I am fully known. I have had to learn to love beyond presence, which is no easy feat if you have lived in close proximity with everyone you care for. I have learned to remember, even when the memory of love seems close enough to touch, yet just out of reach, like stretching out for something smoke-thin, non-existent. And though my memories are near and yet impossibly far, I use them as a form of endurance, choosing softness in a world that teaches us to harden.

It is my third year away from home. I am learning more, loving deeper, and discovering how memory stretches itself to bridge the distance between absence and affection. I walk bravely through my past, treasuring every place I was loved, carrying hope for reunion, and loving still, no matter the distance.

May love be our refuge.

May love prevail.

“I feel like a seed buried deep in the soil pressed under darkness, pressure, and the weight of everything I don’t understand. Even so, something in me keeps pushing upward, inch by inch, toward a light I can’t yet see. I am so hopeful but wary at the same time. I am trying to push past my emotions and treat myself like a little seedling. The rooting is also growth. Slow, hidden, silent but growth nonetheless.”

As the year winds down, I find myself doing what I always do: rereading my journals in hopes of rediscovering myself. I marvel at the cycles; the growth, the regressions, the pauses that felt like nothingness at the time but now look like quiet transitions. I sift through these pages to find a new word for the coming year, something to give it shape and direction. This year, that word was growth.

I remember how I stepped into January, eyes gleaming with anticipation, hoping to grow into something grand, something vast, powerful, expansive. But now I understand that the definition I gave myself didn’t quite match the reality of what growth truly is.

Growth is one of the most generous gifts God has given us. It’s something we can choose daily. It’s something that exists whether you run for ten minutes or an hour, whether you move a centimetre or a mile. Growth is growth — nonetheless.

I realised that I had equated growth with becoming unrecognisable by the end of the year, as if change only counts when it is dramatic. But that isn’t always the case. Sometimes growth means retaining parts of myself and treating them with tenderness. Sometimes it means standing in the same place, but with stronger feet. Sometimes it means daring to keep my eyes hopeful and against all odds, to still be here. To try still.

My greatest growth this year was learning not to illegitimize my own achievements simply because they did not appear grand or impressive. They were achievements nonetheless — and they deserved gratitude. Allowing myself that kindness has strengthened my hope. It has shown me that if I can do the small thing today, then one day I will do the big thing too.

Looking back at a specific journal entry, I think of the metaphor of the tree — how its roots must push through the darkness of the soil before anything ever sprouts. Even when it grows slowly, little by little, bit by bit, it grows nonetheless. No one can deny that. Even if its rooting takes time, it becomes a tree eventually, branches and all woven into the story it was always meant to tell.

When I wrote that entry, I was experiencing one of the darkest seasons of my life. Now, rereading it, I realise: I survived it. I am here. I am standing, my feet stronger on the ground beneath me, my eyes once again gleaming with anticipation.

And that is growth — nonetheless.