Photography by John Divola
I’ve always said I’m nomadic. It’s one of the stories I’ve told myself that’s helped explain me to me.
I grew up in Bulgaria in the ’90s, just after the old world of the USSR fell apart and before anyone had worked out what the new one looked like. My mother was the kind of woman who figured things out before others did. She built things in that gap—a radio station, a newspaper, a life—and in doing so, she opened doors to places our family wouldn’t otherwise have gone. Hotels, resorts, conference halls, holiday huts in the mountains—the way she moved through different settings imprinted itself upon my early years. She’d take me with her, and I’d run around glorious, massive hallways covered with chandeliers that weren’t turned on to save electricity—somehow grandiose and shabby at the same time. People were learning what luxury was, they weren’t sure what quality was, so every venue and every event was just trying to find what that meant based on their own limited experience. To some it was homemade food, to others it was things that looked golden, to others it was unlimited running hot water. My mother found ways to feel at home everywhere we went, and by extension I felt that too.
I think this childhood of sleeping in different beds and having a great time made me capable of sleeping in many beds and having a great time. I’ve always travelled for different reasons, but it was when I became a CEO that my desire to travel matched my professional purpose. I’ve slept in many hotels and planes and found home in many sheets and covers. Home for me is when I have enough beds to sleep in per year.
I was talking to a friend about nonmonogamy, its challenges and gifts recently. She’s new to it, and I’m forever new to it, but I have practiced it for years. I told her that I think my heart is nomadic. It needs different homes to feel at home. I would describe this fleeting sense of being at home as a perfect blend of feeling like I can fall asleep without thinking about how I look, and feeling a quiet sense of longing for being in another place. Holding someone, being held by someone, being fully immersed in them, but also having a hum of what I’m not holding and feeling right now. A blend of what is now and what it makes impossible right now. A settling and a longing.
When I moved away to London as a teenager, I felt this for the first time. I loved my bed, I loved my tiny room, I loved my aloneness. And I always thought of home back in Bulgaria, of my bed there, of my parents, of my sister. The pull was painful and comforting.
I gave birth in March 2026. I’m writing this in June 2026. I no longer fully understand my own story about myself and my nomadism. Parts of me do, but many parts don’t and I feel a new dimension in my existence. My life now has a depth and shape that I didn’t have the senses to understand before. While many parts of me still look for this harmony between feeling settled and longing, a small, tender, growing part feels grounded, committed, and solid—so much so that this new feeling can squash everything else. The desire to remain her home. Her stable, safe, warm, and colorful home where she can be whoever she wants to be, whenever she wants to be.
I don’t remember my nomadism. While there are sides to me which keep living like they used to—feeling at home with different people and in different places—there is something new in me that is unmoving. They say that during birth, the baby exchanges brain cells with the mother. Maybe I’ve become a host for a new worldview that I didn’t intellectually come up with. And this worldview is making me into a home, one that moves and goes places, but remains one. Maybe I felt at home in all these places as a child, because my true home was always there with me—something I only understand now that I’m a mother too. My heart is a nomad and my heart is a home.
