It was hard to believe we were back in the States after eight years of expat life in London. It had only been a couple of unbearably humid late summer months in Sarasota, but the shift was immediate. Target runs. School drop-off lines. Weekend mall laps. After-school sports and the slow choreography of carpool and calendars. Of course I wanted my children to feel grounded and happy and confident in their new school. That part mattered more than anything. Still, as I pulled away after morning drop-off, I found myself wondering who’s wandering into Montparnasse -my favorite little French café around the corner from the flat we used to call home. What new boutiques had opened on the high street? What was on display at the V&A right now? I wish I had made time for Epic Iran before we left. London felt so far away on every level. Some days it felt like it belonged to another version of me. And some days, my heart quietly sank.

No one really talks about how strange it is to come back home after some time. You expect familiarity to feel comforting. Instead, it can feel disorienting. Suburban life runs smoothly, I suppose, as it always has. Grocery pickups. Tawny stucco, 80s-esque shopping plazas. Nail salons next to banks. Drive-through lattes on the way to practice. Everything is efficient. And yet I kept finding myself missing the friction of a different life. Walking instead of driving. Stopping in a new cafe because it happened to be on the corner. Wandering into a museum on a random afternoon because it was already part of the neighborhood. Here, life required more planning and a lot more parking.

As I reflect now, the harder part is realizing how much you’ve changed, even when nothing about the place you came back to seems to have.

The woman who learned to navigate another country and its cultural rhythms with family in tow, and to prefer depth over volume in friendships rather than calendar-driven socializing, does not simply slide back into the familiar. It goes without saying that I am grateful for stability and the convenience of it all. I’m grateful for a life that feels safe and somewhat predictable for my children. But there is a certain grief in letting go of a version of yourself that felt more alert, more open, more constantly in conversation with the dynamic world around her.

So I have learned to be gentle with the transition. Comfort helped, even when it looked painfully ordinary. A slow wander through the mall (I was overjoyed that one of my favorite stores, Anthropologie, had returned to my life). Rearranging pieces of my past in new spaces. Surely it wasn’t glamorous, but it steadied me while I figured out where I belong again.

What I continue to search for is connection that matches who I am now. A new community, not just an inherited one. Women who are also in between chapters and still care about culture and ideas and building something meaningful in their next season. I don’t want to lose the parts of myself that were shaped by living elsewhere. The appetite for beauty, conversation, and surprise. Coming home after London isn’t about going back. It’s about learning how to live fully inside a much quieter landscape without shrinking the woman I became while I was away.

This is where Silk + Salt comes in.

I created it because I could not find a space sophisticated enough to encompass the full range of women’s experiences at this stage of life. A place where grace and grit are not opposites, but truths that show up when we need them to. We are capable of empathy and sharp clarity, sometimes within the same conversation. We can care about beauty and still care deeply about what is happening in the world. We can seek sophistication and also insist on authenticity and honesty from those who matter to us.

Silk represents the parts of our lives shaped by beauty, creativity, intimacy, and the way we notice the world. Salt is the experience that sharpens us, the opinions we have earned, the losses, the friction, the politics, the power, and the courage to speak from a lived perspective. Together, they reflect the reality of women who have lived enough to know that identity is layered, and belonging is something we build deliberately.

Silk + Salt exists to create a space that holds perspective, community, and diversity of experience, and invites women to see, hear, and speak the many ways we arrive at who we are. And so with that, I hope you’ll join me in this new undertaking.

Vijaya Camillo

Founder, Silk + Salt