As my time in Peru is winding down (literally flying out tomorrow...yikes) and I’m getting
ready for another international move (Hello China!) I was struck with the same feeling I had when I was about to leave Korea...I’m not ready.
When I visit the US a lot of my friends ask me the same thing: when are you coming home? Getting ready to pack up and leave a place where I feel at home got me thinking about what "home" is. Society seems to want us to only have one place that is “home”, I beg to differ with that idea. Baltimore (USA) is home, it’s where I was raised and where most of my family still lives. Korea is home. I have amazing friends there, Seoul is my favorite city in
the world, I had a great life there. Lima is home; my aunt (who I relate to most in my family) lives there, in a month I had made some amazing friends and had favorite places to go. In all of these places I’ve had struggles and great joy, I learned a lot and grew a lot.
So is there really only one place to call home? Is the country you hold a passport from
home? How do you define home? One of the gifts and curses of expat life is being able to build a life in many places, which translates into many places feeling like home. So when my friends back in the US ask me “when are you coming home?”. My answer is “I am home”. This of course generates confusion because I’m only visiting the US and they can’t understand how somewhere on the other side of the world could possibly be home. And there’s another reality of being an
expat, not being able to explain it. If someone has never experienced it for themselves, it’s hard to explain and harder for it to be understood.
How we define home is different for each person, I don’t feel I’m wrong for saying I have
three places I call home. They are places I have strong emotional attachments to and places I will continue to visit no matter where in the world I live. Where and what is home for you?
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