As a way of killing time during my last week of vacation, I’ve been organizing the photos saved on my computer, and have gone through almost twenty years of my life as a result. Looking at so many photos over different periods of my life has been like watching a montage of the most memorable images I have lived through. It allowed me to see the beginnings and endings I’ve experienced: the different friend groups I’ve had, milestones like my high school graduation, and the last photo I took outside my house in London before my family moved to Brazil.
Going through photos reminded me the ways my life has changed over the years, especially the places I have lived in and have called “home” at a certain point. The idea of home has always been somewhat blurry to me and is something that I’ve never been quite able to define. The few times I have moved to a new country, I felt like I was leaving my true home behind. When I moved to Brazil, I felt like my real home was in London, yet when I moved away for college, I knew I was leaving another home again. The way I thought about home was constantly changing, to the point where I felt like I had several homes scattered across the world, each representing a different phase of my life.
While attending an international school for almost eight years, I became part of a community of students who had experienced moving from place to place and making new lives for themselves every time they moved. I got used to my friends moving away and making new ones every semester when more people came in. In more ways than one, everyone who was a part of our school’s international community had experienced these changes, and for those who moved as often as once a year, the idea of home can become especially complex.
Even though I have only moved a few times, I am still confronted with the way I define home every time I go back to one of the places I have lived in before. Coming home after my first semester of college was a shock to me: while it seemed like everything was still the same as when I left, it was clear that life in Brazil had gone on without me for the past six months. It was still the home I knew, but it was different, and it had moved on.
Reminiscing on the places I’ve defined as home made me realize that, for me, home is something that is constantly changing, and is often more than just a place. Home can be a person you’ve known your entire life, a sensation of total comfort, or somewhere that transports you back to your past. If you are someone who has moved around, if you went to an international school, if you left your family to go to college, then you may understand what it’s like to leave certain pieces of your identity in different places. I spent my childhood in London, grew up in Brazil, and learned to live independently in New York—when I return to each of them, I know I’m going somewhere that contains a piece of me and probably always will.
