A few months ago, I was sitting at a brown coffee table in a room with sparse outlets and a light dim enough to make me forget the whiffs of Wing Snob fries and cajun ranch that occasionally occupied my senses. I was nowhere other than the Michigan Union basement, a place very familiar to people either in their worst moments of studying or the best moments of eating a meal right after a long day. Even if that meant it was a dry Qdoba bowl that had neither beans nor hot sauce (so really, what am I eating). Specifically, I was in the back room of the basement where the aesthetics of the tables, the walls, and the few monitors lined against the wall all seem mildly misaligned. But I believe that's its charm. It seemed like the lighting was inviting enough for me to pull out my sage green leuchtturm1917 notebook; mind you, it's the only notebook I've ever bought with so much money, and so much purpose. 

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I don't particularly journal. That feels too dishonest to say that I practice the art of journaling. I do, however, sometimes find myself moving my pen on paper, writing one may even say. Sometimes it's done well, and often it's done as though I'm trying to imitate what I think should be going into such a notebook.

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It was the month of October, where every day in Ann Arbor I walk outside and notice the leaves of the trees on the Diag or the ones that creep onto the kitchen windowsill change color in miniscule ways. Fall feels like a season dedicated to introspection and reflection. At least, to an overthinker such as myself. It's the reds and oranges that hover above my head with little patches of sun that manage to cascade through the trees. In those moments, everything feels worth noting down: how the sun was gleaming, how the air was cold enough for my nose to get stiff, or how these streets adorning the trees I've grown fond of will soon become an artifact of nostalgia.

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"Do you ever lie when you journal?"

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I guess my sage green notebook had garnered questions I wasn't exactly sure I knew the answer to. Across from me at that table in the Union, I was sitting with one of my closest friends who had just asked me the above question. I've known her for a long time — 4 years (almost) by the time we graduate to be more exact. She was someone I respected in many regards, and one of them was as a writer. How was I to admit to myself that sometimes, the answer to her question would be yes. Yes, I do lie a little when I journal. It's unfortunately nothing melodramatic. Afterall, the lie sits in a notebook that I wouldn't even call my journal, and its only reader (I would hope) is me.

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Instead of looking back to see that I couldn't do work another day or I couldn't get myself to eat breakfast, my favorite meal, I give myself some grace and lie just a little. That I felt like I knew with conviction I would get to work to the extent I needed to, and that I would eat my favorite meal. In reality, I do get myself to do that, but it's not the day that I said I did, or with the exact vigour I wrote it out to be. It's a lie because it isn't the whole truth. In that same way, I give an answer that never feels like a whole truth to a simple question: where are you from?

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God, how I hate this question. Because I can’t say all the following in twenty seconds. 

The answer is “it depends”. I've been quietly revising my response , telling myself a slightly cleaner version of the story each time. But why? Why do that when I can have my sage green journal exposed to a few more eyes, who can  read what I've fleshed out from a clean half lie to the mess that  feels truthful to me as I read it now.

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And since we're telling the truth, the greatest discomfort moving has provided me: I wish to feel I was from both somewhere, and yet, everywhere. Hence, a treacherous cognitive dissonance to a simple question.

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When I feel the former, I feel one of the deadliest sins. Oh, I’ve been so envious. Most often it’s to a trivial degree, though it does linger in the air when people speak of their homes, their hometown friends, or a plethora of memories that don't feel like they need to rest as just a memory. I still sometimes feel a childish urge to have a "favorite place I always used to eat at as a kid".  My throat lumps up, worrying how my measly three, or even less, years of loving that certain restaurant stands no ground against my opponent, who has spent ten or even twenty one years loving that place. Really, no one else is worried. 

It’s easy to relax when what you say you love, and where you think you’re from doesn’t have to be justified. Even for a moment. Even to yourself. 

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Most of where I've lived are places I don't have any reason to go back to. It's led to me wandering to the other side of the spectrum, to harp on how I am from everywhere I have lived, or everywhere I can remember I have. It’s my way of defense: I don’t understand your home as well when I called it mine, so you can’t understand me either. After many lies and half truths   I have to accept that what I've been trying to mimic is a sentiment of belonging.

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It felt almost simplistic to boil it down to this concept, but it's only natural. In the world of social psychology, Roy Baumeister and Mark Leary are two researchers who have done foundational work on the human need for belonging. Their work, "The Need to Belong", explains how belonging goes beyond cultural implications, serving as an innate function to our evolutionary advantage. Strong social bonds have evolutionarily strengthened our ability to form networks that support one another's survival, whether that's with finding food, shelter, or something psychological. Even research has said that sometimes we get the choice to belong, and other times, we're grouped into an "othering" bucket, largely based on conventional groups such as kinship, societal institutions, or other identities like race and gender. I’ve always felt like I had no choice for an easy answer; when I made it into one, it remained the wrong choice, either for me or for those who asked. 

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This attempt to capture some of my life has given me a chance to explore how we associate a part of ourselves with the place around us, knowing that most centrally, we look to belong to something larger than labels or words. Especially just one.

I remember a quote I came across from David Harvey, who's known for his academic focus on analyzing urban geography and economy. His ideology of "The Right to the City" has been detailed in his essay as an effort to describe the importance of community democracy and autonomy in a growing urban space. Within the first few pages, he states something that sparked a little bit of this project: "the right to the city is far more than a right of individual access to the resources that the city embodies: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city more after our hearts' desire". While his intention was to speak on urbanization and its effects on people at a neighborhood level, it struck me in a much narrower way — to the single individual. To me.

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The places I've lived in have taught me what I'm drawn to, what I grieve, and what I didn't know was happening to me in the process of an ongoing reconstruction of everything around me. There's a dual nature to how we extend ourselves into the places we inhabit: what we attach to, we protect. The fields of sociology or even anthropology will tell you in great detail about the concepts I attempt to grapple with, such as place attachment or place identity. But what no framework quite captured for me is the feeling of having to rebuild your sense of home repeatedly, and what you discover about yourself each time you do. Sometimes we’ve built some malfunctions; they’ve been just as hard to remove as it’s been to go back to most of my homes once it’s all wrapped up. But my mind is allowed to time travel in ways my body cannot. 

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This isn’t a guide to moving, nor is it a self-help type of guide. It’s a guide to reflect through a lens of specificity, the only one I can speak through with vivid clarity. There’s time worth spending on your important spaces or people and how you move through them, no matter their stability. Deconstructing the rigid concept of home can be a way to create something flexible from something that feels naturally immovable. Afterall, there’s always something worth changing - you, your homes (whatever that is in its all encompassing form), or your perceptions of either. That’s overwhelming though. 

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As I stand at the door of a new home, I know unloading what’s sprawled out will take years of my life to make it as it was or as I want it to be. But it must be done, and it will be done slowly. We must start somewhere.