Homeward bound?

I’m on the 3rd flight of the day, heading back to New York City from Buenos Aires. I’ve gotten used to leaving in the middle of the night and spending all day getting from one destination to the next. It still amazes me that we have the technology to move our physical selves through such large spans of land in so little time.

Feeling check. What’s going through my mind right now? Well, people in Argentina kept asking me, where are you going now? Are you going home? It was a difficult question to answer. Because truth being told, I really don’t feel as if I have a home. I’ve been moving around since I was 18, and I haven’t found a place yet that I feel I can label ….home.

It’s almost as hard as the question, “where are you from?” The place where you are from is part of your identity, it’s part of who you are. While Sylvania, Ohio has certainly shaped me, it more helped me to realize who I’m not and where I don’t want to be. Whenever I answer, “Ohio,” I always feel as if it’s not right, that it’s not an adequate answer, but at the same time, it’s true.

It’s also part of the immigrant equation. When my parents decided to live outside of Taiwan, away from their family, they unknowingly created an identity crisis for the next generation. They raised me culturally Taiwanese, in a small American suburb, far away from their own home. Which left me to figure out how much of me was Taiwanese, how much of me was American? More importantly, it left me to question this idea of home. It definitely wasn’t the small Midwestern suburb, where all my friends have since moved, and only my parents reside.

For some people, home is not a question. It’s a given. It’s where your family is, it’s where your friends are, it’s where you were born and where your father and his father were born. But once a generation moves, home becomes something much more fluid. It becomes where you feel comfortable, which in itself can mean so many different things.

For the past few years, I’ve been trying to decide what that means, to feel comfortable.
I moved out of New York, because something about living there was definitely UNcomfortable. I was tired of all the running around, of all the extra steps that you have to think through before you leave the house, or becoming SO guarded about my time and energy. I had an amazing group of friends, an amazing Capoeira group…but, I just wanted a break. So I moved….to North Carolina, a place where I had some roots from college and was definitely a place, for sure, more physically comfortable.

In Durham, I had space, I had time, I had comfort. It was beautiful, there were trees everywhere, and I felt a strong physical connection to the beauty and lifestyle of North Carolina. But, I didn’t have my support system. I didn’t have a possibility to really train capoeira with my own vision. In the two years that I spent there, I didn’t really find the community in which I felt….at home.

So, I left. There were, still are, definite doubts in my head; did I give NC enough time? Will I ever truly be content in one place? What is it that I want in a location? These are questions that run in and out of my mind as I go through my travels this year, and I haven’t necessarily gotten closer to an answer.

I suppose an important thing to keep in mind, is that there is NO perfect place. I have to prioritize what is most important to me and run with that. I keep writing down pros and cons of each place I visit. Really, though, I have a feeling, that in the end, it’s going to come down to some chance that presents itself, some opportunity that I can’t see yet. So, come on opportunity…I’m waiting!