Where Have I Spent My Life?

A life is distributed across cities, countries and continents: some places take up years, others only a moment. But the amount of time we spend somewhere tells only part of the story. The same place can contain completely different lives. This map traces mine through the places I’ve lived, studied, worked and travelled. Looking at it now, the dots begin to form a sequence — chapters that were not necessarily visible while I was living them.

TYPE

TIME SCALE

ABOUT THIS MAP

This is a personal geography of the places where I have lived, studied, worked and travelled over 35 years. Each circle represents a place in my life that I remember for something.

The map is not a complete record of every place I have ever been. I have left out purely logistical stops and places that did not leave me with anything in particular to remember.

HOW TO READ IT

Circle size represents the amount of time spent in a place.

Short stay

Long stay

The map uses a logarithmic scale by default, so that both short stays and long periods remain visible. A power scale (exponent 0.5) is also available as an alternative.

Circle colour shows who I was with: alone, with family, or with friends.

Alone

With family

With friends

The filters allow you to look at different types of places — home, purpose (work, studies, conferences and other professional activities), and leisure (holidays, trips and visits).

The chapters below the map provide another way of reading the same geography: not by location or duration, but by periods of my life.

DATA & METHOD

Dates are exact where records were available and approximate otherwise. Days are a visual measure of duration, not a precise count.

A place can appear more than once when different periods had different experiences or belonged to different chapters.

The map is therefore a reconstruction rather than a complete database of my life — a way of organising the places, periods and experiences that have stayed in my memory when I look back at them now.

WITH WHOM

Alone

With family

With friends

TIME SPENT

Short stay

Long stay

LIFE IN CHAPTERS

WHAT THE MAP DOESN’T SHOW

There is something strange about seeing a life reduced to dots.

Some are large because I spent years there. Others are barely visible because I stayed for only a few days. On the map, this makes perfect sense: the longer I stayed, the larger the dot.

But duration is a poor measure of significance.

The amount of time I spent somewhere tells me how long I was there, but not what that period became in the context of my life. Years in one place can blur into one continuous stretch. A few days somewhere else can remain distinct for years. Time measures duration, not importance.

The same city can also contain several different versions of the same person. What I experienced in Geneva the first time I visited it was not the same as what I experienced there several years later, even though the map records both as the same location. The city stayed in the same place; I did not.

And places can affect each other in ways that only become visible later. A short trip can influence a decision about work. A temporary choice can turn into seven years. An event that seemed insignificant can become important once we know what followed.

Looking back, we also tend to connect these events into a story. We divide our lives into chapters, identify turning points, and give earlier decisions a significance they may not have had at the time. What looks like a clear sequence in retrospect may have felt like a series of unrelated choices while it was happening.

This is where the map reaches its limit. It can show where I lived, studied and travelled, and roughly how long I spent in each place. It can reveal the geography of my life.

But it cannot show what each place meant, how that meaning changed, or whether the connections between them were really there — or were created later, when I started looking back.

ANTONINA POPOVA · 2026