A piece about my identity

Hey everyone!

As of about two weeks now I've been in Viadana, Italy, visiting my mom's family for the better part of the summer. This is the first time I've been back in the summer in a long time, and since it's been bringing back lots of memories of my summertime visits every year as a child, I was inspired to write a piece about my background, my life, and my identity as a transnational individual.

It's very personal and I've worked very hard on it and grown fond of it, so I hope you all like it as well. The next step will be to translate it into Italian as well.

Enjoy!

Everywhere Boy:
Few written accounts in reference to identity and transnational experience have resonated with me more than In Other Words, by the famed and talented Indian American writer Jhumpa Lahiri. This bilingual account of her experience living in Italy and stubbornly swearing off writing within her usual comfort zone of English to fulfill a longstanding dream of becoming fluent in Italian admirably retells her brave repeated ventures into the linguistic and cultural unknown that gradually becomes less unknown. Over the course of the book Lahiri also delves further into her own experiences as an individual with an immigrant background in America, growing up bilingual and navigating not just the different resonances between her first language of English and home language of Bengali, but the different worlds attached to them. Being half American and half second generation Italian, raised in a bilingual and bicultural household, this beautiful book resonated deeply with me in the context of my own experiences, perhaps more so than anywhere else in this specific quote:

Chi non appartiene a nessun posto specifico non può tornare, in realtà, da nessuna parte. I concetti di esilio e di ritorno implicano un punto di origine, una patria. Senza una patria e senza una vera lingua madre, io vago per il mondo, anche dalla mia scrivania. Alla fine mi accorgo che non è stato un vero esilio: tutt'altro. Sono esiliata perfino dalla definizione di esilio.

“Those who don’t belong to any specific place can’t, in fact, return anywhere. The concepts of exile and return imply a point of origin, a homeland. Without a homeland and without a true mother language, I wander about the world, even at my desk. In the end I realize that it wasn’t a true exile: far from it. I am exiled even from the definition of exile.”


I was born on June 2 (Italian Republic Day, incidentally), 1996, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, to two parents who both came from somewhere else: my father from New Brunswick, New Jersey, and more crucially for the purposes of this piece, my mother from Viadana, Italy, a town of 20,000 souls in the Province of Mantova in the far south of the northern region of Lombardy. I have been fortunate as a child of parents from two different countries and cultures to be raised with a strong sense of personal connection to both of them. I was raised bilingual, often codeswitching in different contexts as I navigated the spaces of home, school, public, friend’s houses, and Italian-speaking friends’ houses. In my earliest formative years before I started elementary school, I would spend long stretches in Italy, up to months at a time, which deeply affected me in even subconscious ways I remain barely aware of.

Nearly every summer as a child I traveled to Italy, and would spend between three and six weeks there at my grandmother and uncle’s house - my mother’s childhood home. Even before I was self-aware enough to truly understand the extent to which those visits influenced me, I looked forward to them and beheld them as a source of many happy memories and adventures. I close my eyes and I can still feel the unforgiving sun beating down through the humidity of early afternoon, the thrill of jostling back and forth between the curves of the bright blue slides of the local swimming pool, the mouthwatering scent of my grandmother’s agnolini in brodo (tiny tortellini-shaped dumplings stuffed with ground pork and served in hot chicken broth with a dash of grated Parmesan cheese) that she served unfailingly as the first meal upon our every hazy and bedraggled arrival from Bologna’s Guglielmo Marconi Airport, the high-pitched calls of the doves echoing from nearby trees, going for walks with my sister past roughened farmhouses and dazzling green fields. The memories and sensations are endless, and I could easily fill a book just by listing them.

Growing up bilingual is also something which has profoundly colored and affected my experience in life. I consider Italian my native language and English my first language, as the first language in which I spoke and the one I have used the most in my life and education respectively. In the earliest years of my childhood especially, though, the lines were blurred and hazy. Given all the time I spent with my mother and in Italy with her relatives in those early years, Italian was my native language in the sense that it was the first in which I strung words together into thoughts, conducted my first forays into expressing myself, and learned to characterize things around me - colors, numbers, animals, people, food. Rosso. Red. Azzurro. Light or sky blue. Uno. One. Dodici. Twelve. Orso polare. Polar bear (which has become something of an inside joke in my family from when my American Aunt Julia attempted to read to me from one of my animal books when I was three or four). Mamma. Mom. Nonna. Grandmother. Zio. Uncle.

For years Italian remained my dominant language, and even though I gradually began to pick up English too, my English remained broken and thickly accented until I started elementary school, as evidenced from my parents’ home videos that sit gathering dust quietly on video cassettes in some dim corner of our basement. I too recall that period of time, where so many different things, from my mom’s explanation of the plot of Chicken Run, one of my favorite movies of the time, to quizzical inquiries, simultaneously simple and boundlessly complex, into abstract notions of time and being, simply sounded better and more natural to me expressed in Italian.


Over the course of my later preschool years into early elementary school, I began to more intimately engage with southeastern Michigan, where I was living, beyond the comforting and sweet-smelling borders of my familiar Italian bubble. I celebrated Halloween, dressing up one year as Bob the Builder and the next as some colorful and exotic species of pheasant, and Thanksgiving at school and with American friends and playmates. My family and I spent Saturday afternoons watching college football over barbecue and our Lebanese neighbors’ home-cooked dishes. We ice skated and sled, went on walks through fiery fall foliage, and canoed in the Huron River, depending on the season. Fourth of Julys were celebrated with pool cookouts and then with evenings spent below the multi-colored spectacle of the annual fireworks show at my elementary school neighborhood. From elementary school into high school, I made friends of diverse family origins, from Taiwan to Sri Lanka and Israel to Finland. I watched all the typical Disney Channel shows that late ‘90’s kids (myself included) now look back on with great nostalgia - Hannah Montana, That’s So Raven, The Suite Life of Zack and Cody; numerous Animal Planet shows and documentaries; and eventually Glee and The Simpsons as I approached adolescence. Crucially, with little other choice given my total immersion, I adopted English as my dominant language fully within two or three years, losing all trace of my accent that my dad always laughingly compares to that of “a little old immigrant man from the Bronx,” on account of all the TV shows I consumed, the English-speaking friends I made, and importantly, the countless books of every imaginable sort that I constantly and voraciously read. I was raised fully embracing the American reality which surrounded me.

However, at the same time, stepping into our home meant taking a metaphorical step across the ocean. Vibrant Italian conversations peppered with proverbs, profanities, and exclamations of local Lombard-Emilian dialect resounded through the house, which wove in and out of our English in a bizarre but comfortable codeswitchy mess that made sense only to us and other Italian and American families like ours. The table and my sisters’ and my lunch boxes overflowed with spaghetti all'amatriciana, steaming minestrone, and tiramisu. I watched many Pimpa cartoons, animated Enzo d’Alò movies, and dubbed Disney flicks in my spare time. And, of course, we anxiously looked forward to those famed summer visits to Viadana. Home was always comforting in that it always housed the best of both places and cultures that defined us.

As I grew a little older, around the age of twelve I began to develop a strong and tenacious passion for the histories, cultures, and languages of distant lands, and as fate would have it, the summer after this passion of mine first blossomed we skipped our annual trip to Italy, intending instead to return at Christmastime that year. Without the return to my mother’s homeland, which had become a standard staple of my summers since before I could remember, I noticed that there was an obvious emptiness in the year, and as a result I realized how important regularly being there truly was to me. Since, at the time, I had grown so deeply fascinated by many places far afield from those I usually found myself in the world, but had no direct link to, whether through culture, upbringing, or experience, I looked to Italy as my other country, one that I began to realize I cared about and felt connected to so immensely, as a place to hold onto and define myself within the global reaches of my interests. My sense of self shifted.

This soon coincided with a reluctant and somewhat shameful acceptance of the fact that my Italian had worsened significantly after so many years of going to school in a Midwestern college town which lacked a large or cohesive Italian community, and rejecting the Italian language and culture events tirelessly put together by the busily disjointed, but warm Italian community that did exist, which we called la Scuola Arcobaleno, the Rainbow School, because I stubbornly maintained that I was above the level of teaching I was receiving there. I’d never had a continuous or reliable education in Italian compared to the one I was getting at school in the United States, and I was horrified by the consequential realization of the fact that my vocabulary was full of obvious gaps, my writing skills were positively atrocious and full of rules I’d imagined and invented in my own head, and my expressive capabilities were far behind where I wanted them to be (though my reading comprehension was surprisingly decent). In a move which many of those around me of all ages were quite taken aback by, right in the midst of the fraught and socially stressful time that was my middle school experience, I opted to spend five months studying in Italy, living with my family, in the hopes of improving my Italian, making local friendships with kids my own age, and forging a stronger connection with my other country.

My time studying in Italy was not always an easy experience: I had to navigate a school system with vastly different expectations of students, studying eight or nine subjects in a different language than I was used to through unfamiliar tactics like rote learning and oral tests (fittingly referred to as interrogazioni, interrogations), bear with my relatives as they sorted out the nerves associated with preparing to sell that childhood home the next spring and move into apartments, and butted heads occasionally. But I certainly accomplished the goals I had set out to - though I felt intimidated by certain aspects of how many of them socialized, I made friendships and had a lot of fun with people I met both at school and through my friend Alex, the son of my mom’s close childhood friend Carla. I felt decently settled into my school environment, which was far smaller than my middle school back in the States, getting to know many people and helping the sweet and knowledgeable English teacher, Professora Pedrazzini, giving presentations in English to all the different classes of the different grades, which I returned to do in subsequent visits for a few years afterwards (ironically, even I did not receive a 10, which was the highest grade possible, in English). I strengthened my connection with the place and my understanding of my family background and history beyond what I thought possible. Importantly to me, my language skills skyrocketed. I studied the grammar and orthography at school, with considerate extra assistance from the appropriate teachers. I hung out with my new local friends. I formed a routine with my grandmother where we’d watch certain television shows together every week and almost every evening, from Gerry Scotti’s version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? and other game shows to Ti Lascio Una Canzone (I Leave You a Song), which became my favorite, in which astonishingly talented children competed in performances of old but gold Italian songs (mostly pop) from bygone decades, introducing me to new songs and artists that I lovingly listen to to this day (especially my mom’s favorite from her youth, Lucio Battisti). I even determinedly made sure to make my entrance into the Italian readership, completing my first book read in Italian cover-to-cover: the translated version of Nicholas Sparks’ Three Weeks with My Brother. By the end of that semester, I was basically as fluent in Italian as I was in English, and Italy was no longer just my mother’s home; in a more holistic sense, it was now also truly mine. When I was little my summer visits always held a sort of dreamy or surreal haze about them, and in my mind occupied a very defined period of life and the year between the beginning of June and the end of July. Now, having spent a long period of time there where the place itself changed a lot, and I did too in turn, that surreal spell was cleared, and took on a sense of realer connection and belonging.

In subsequent years, I returned often to visit friends and family, visit new places, and keep up my language skills and connection to this place that is so important to me. Things changed and shifted in some ways - some visits have been short and hectic. In these, every day is meticulously planned to ensure as many people as possible will be seen, and even then a few usually have to be left out. Some are long and relaxingly drawn out, up to a month or longer, and constitute idyllic little refuges of time from the pressures and expectations of day to day life in the States or elsewhere; sometimes several days go by without any noteworthy plans, consisting of eating and watching Italian television with my grandmother, reading, and going for long bike rides or walks on the argini, walkable and bikeable paths atop winding fortifications meant to defend the agricultural fields which are the economic lifeblood of the area from the Po River’s unforgiving floods. Since most of my loved ones and friends here are busy with their everyday lives - studying for the university exams that are cruelly scheduled at random intervals all throughout the year in the Italian system, busy with work, or caring for aging relatives - sometimes the stretches of fully relaxing days get a little long, and things border on boring. But it’s a kind of boring that’s fitting, that’s needed from time to time, that is reassuring in the freedom it gives you to do pretty near whatever you want. Increasingly over recent years, as I’ve managed to make close friendships with amazing Italians from other regions further afield I’ve met while studying in a whole host of other countries, I’ll frantically try to squeeze in a few visits to their necks of the woods while I’m on their side of the pond.

Ever since that fateful summer of my thirteenth year, when I began to be more fully conscious of the implications of my dual identity, I’ve struggled somewhat to define it in a cohesive manner that is easily understandable to people in my life, and new people I get introduced to over time. Although it would appear to describe me at a surface level, I identify little with the label of Italian American. Perhaps this is overly analytical and focused on specifics and semantics. But to me, it’s always carried an association with the descendants of the waves of Italian immigrants who came to the United States between 1890 and 1920, between the two World Wars, and following World War II. People who, though they may bear Italian names and heritage, have little in the way of connections to the contemporary country, usually practice Catholicism much more strongly than residents of today’s Italy, often don’t speak the language because their impoverished immigrant ancestors usually only spoke their local dialects and had to learn English to communicate even with fellow Italians from other areas of the country, and generally have a rose-tinted vision of “the Old Country” as described in the childhood memories of their great-grandparents. Although I completely respect and am interested in these people’s backgrounds and stories, I relate little to them. I have always viewed the parts of me that are Italian and American as fully distinct from each other, because they come from two different worlds that have no connection to one another, save for how they intersect in my specific life and body. Though they hail from New Jersey, no blood relatives of ours on my father’s side of my family carry any Italian heritage. And my mother is the only person in her entire family to have left the Pianura Padana, the agricultural flatland between the Alps and Apennines where our ancestors have resided, likely, for centuries.

I’ve come to a point in my life where I’ve realized that the experiences I’ve had of growing up between different cultures and living in different places have defined me as a person, that I would not be who I am without them, and I wouldn’t want to be anyone else, but also that I must, to some extent, resign myself to the fact that there is no place in the world where I am truly at home anymore, and there probably never will be. Whenever I’m in one of the two countries I belong to, whose citizenships I hold, rendering the elements of the other and how they define me is difficult, in that those elements are either dismissed from lack of comprehension, or seen as a mark of difference, which both bring the same result of alienation.

In the States, people see me as a lifetime resident born and raised in the country, with a neutral Midwestern pronunciation often considered ideal for radio hosts, bearing no trace of the thick Italian accent I used to speak with as a child - and, of course, it cannot be left out or overlooked that my whiteness and the privilege attached to it mean that I am not automatically seen as a foreigner.

Unless people get to know me well, they don’t know or at the very least cannot fully understand the extent to which my connection to Italy that I have nurtured and developed throughout my life has shaped me into who I am today. They don’t know how I took my first tentative steps and faltering, training wheel-aided bike rides in the garden of my mother’s childhood home. Or how I rode on the baby seat on the back of my grandmother’s bike past one of the local farms on the country road behind our old house, how I squirmed with delight whenever we’d ride past because I was excited to see the cows, how riding there through the green fields of spring flecked with red poppies constitute some of my very earliest and most distant memories. How every time I come back to Viadana, multiple times a week I ride my grandfather’s electric blue bike down to the shores of the Po where my mother learned to swim during the weekly Sunday afternoon picnics her family used to have there in the warmer months of the year - an experience even born and raised locals of my generation are unfamiliar with, as the river has been far too polluted to swim in safely for decades before we came into the world. How, thanks to spending time around my relatives speaking it, I’ve grown to understand our local dialect which is really like a language in its own right, not quite Lombard or Emilian, with an acerbic tough love, quick wit, and deep connection and reverence for the natural surroundings and agricultural traditions of the nearby plains - no language I’ve ever been familiar with is quite like it. Or how for years my sister and I would gleefully receive bags of all my favorite candies - Lupo Alberto, Goleador, Smarties (which in Italy are little M&M-like candies, colorful but full of chocolate) from my uncle in the tabaccheria he used to own and run for years, passed to us in front of other patrons of our age with a discreet wink. How, although English is definitely my first language in the sense that it’s the easiest for me to read in, or write academically, in which I have the most formal and educated vocabulary, I feel somehow more graceful and natural expressing myself in certain ways or in certain moments in Italian, perhaps because it harkens back to a time in the formative years of my childhood where that sense of natural, conscious thought first developed. How my aunt, in reality my uncle’s girlfriend, but who is a relative to me just as much of any others with whom I share blood, has always been there for me over the course of my life, organizing various escapades over the years, from cozy Christmas parties to inviting us over to pet her family’s dalmatian, Jenny, and their abundant kittens to being a tireless organizer and supporter of my semester at her old middle school and day trips all over, from Florence to Bolzano. Or how my sister and I used to watch Ice Age, Anastasia, or The Rescuers in their Italian dubs with our grandmother in the cool, dark basement TV room with lemon or cherry ghiaccioli, or popsicles, in hand during the daily after-lunch nap. They don’t know the great pleasures of the simple but delicious food items we’d spend all year waiting to grace our taste buds once more - fior di latte or “flower of milk” flavored gelato, which is like vanilla but also not; the aforementioned agnoli in brodo, which are like tortellini in chicken broth but also not; or melone con prosciutto, slices of Parmesan ham on top of melons jucier and more flavorful than any others in the whole wide world, which maybe sounds a little odd but it’s not - how it feels to have to approximate their familiar and delicious flavors that in the US are a world away. How my family used to run a fruit shop on Via Farini in the center of the nearby city of Parma, the local-point-of-reference big city where people go to buy shoes, go to the movies, or look for specialized high schools; how every visit up until the shop was sold, we’d go stay in Parma for at least a few days in the cozy family apartment we had there, with its marble-colored floors and opaque glass doors, where I remember talking to my great-grandparents as a child when they were still alive and conscious. Or how every visit, at least once, we make our rounds in the local parish’s Cimitero di San Pietro, attentively tending to the graves of all our close relatives who have passed on over the years - my great aunt Santina who raised my grandfather; my great-grandmother Maria, nicknamed Nonna Bella; my great-grandfather Ennio, who was a prisoner of war of the British in Egypt for seven years during World War II; and my grandfather Libero, who passed away suddenly two years before my birth, who I dreamed called me on the phone from Heaven when I was a child and I like to think was really trying to reach me. How, on my most recent visit, I rode with my grandmother down to her cousin’s eyewear store under the porticos in the center of Viadana to give our condolences upon the death of her other cousin, the mayor, who died young and suddenly, and was mourned by the whole town he left behind as well as his young children and kind Moldovan girlfriend. Or the serenity and emotion I feel when I listen to my favorite songs by Lucio Battisti, Claudio Baglioni, Loretta Goggi, Jovanotti, and Francesco de Gregori.

They don’t know how every single time I leave Italy, it feels like a part of my heart is being ripped violently from my chest.

But when I’m in Italy, especially Viadana, I’m l’americano first and foremost in everyone’s eyes. I’m seen as different in spite of how strongly I feel and am connected to the place, because of my distant American birth, upbringing, and education, my strange Hungarian last name I inherited from my paternal grandfather, the occasional stops in conversation where I still do get momentarily tongue-twisted in trying to explain this or find a fleeting word to describe that. But they also don’t know.

They don’t know what it’s like to grow up in one place that feels like home, while also fostering a connection to another distant place that is also home, and try to juggle both of those sets of expectations, traditions, and cultures. When I say that I grew up in the States, all too often their reactions are adjacent to, “what the heck are you doing in this backwater little town here in pianura?!” Though the spell has been at least a bit broken by the mess that the United States has been leading up to and following the 2016 elections, many still view l’America as the land of opportunity and pop culture, and see it through rose-tinted glasses because of the movies, TV shows, and music they’ve grown up consuming. They don’t know about the ingrained, systemic racial discrimination, the insidious capitalist and colonialist legacies, the gun violence and school shootings, the cruel and ongoing criminal colonialist exploitations of U.S. teritories like Guam, Puerto Rico, and the annexed independent kingdom turned state of Hawaii. How difficult and harrowing a time it is and frankly has always been to be anything different or marginalized in the U.S.

They don’t understand where I’ve come from and lived most of my life, the places where I’ve learned to write essays and play tag and make friendships and had crushes and gotten my heart broken, or how it all can intersect from everything I’ve done and the time I’ve spent in Italy. When I talk to my grandmother, I don’t fully convert my accent to the widened American pronunciation of states and cities, instead adopting a more moderate version of her own accented imitation that she says with a momentary lapse in focus and a distant, saddened look in her eye that harkens back to the struggles of accepting her daughter’s desire to leave, to explore, to find her own path. She loves me, but also hesitates at times in her love, as she sees me, and my connection to these faraway places I’ve called my own, as a product of that very transgression of her daughter’s fateful departure.

They don’t know about all the summer trips I spent diving into the warm and windy waters of the Atlantic Ocean off the North Carolina coast on vacation with my dad’s family, watching my grandpop fish for mullet with silent admiration, enjoying the world’s most lovely pink and tangerine sunsets above the tranquil sound side, paying visits to the sea turtle hospital, even seeing a nest of tiny hatchlings empty itself as they scurried to the water’s edge under a clear sky of falling stars. How I loved and looked forward to the unique beauty of every season in Ann Arbor, how spring, summer, fall, and winter all made the places I loved most - downtown, Nichols Arboretum, the shores of the Huron River, my elementary school, Burns Park - look beautiful under sunlit snow, fresh blossoms, or firey fallen leaves. How I practiced ninjitsu, capoeira, or tang soo do in different parts of my life. How I learned about all my different friends’ traditions by visiting their houses and hearing their parents’ unique accents, seeing their photos of distant memories and recent trips back to other lands they related to like I did to Italy, and enjoyed their delicious food, whether Taiwanese, Lebanese, or Sri Lankan.

Or how I paled with stress and struggled with social alienation after my best elementary school friends abandoned me and left me to my social fate in the toxic snakepit of our middle school. Or how I commuted fifteen minutes one way to my high school in the next town over, Ypsilanti, and gave up many of the trappings of a typical American high school experience - football games, homecoming dances, choir competitions, photography or home economics classes I might have otherwise taken, non-existent spontaneous musical numbers - to receive an International Baccalaureate education unique in my area, at Washtenaw International High School, whose first graduating class I am proudly a part of. But also got to experience other typical trappings - a beautiful, well-organized, and fun senior prom; relaxing gatherings with friends and even a few tentative parties; getting to join an afterschool a capella group my senior year; an emotional graduation ceremony. As well as many other unique ones, such as being a part of an organization started by my classmate to help North Korean defectors; numerous annual “international dinners” where my classmates would bring fresh and lovingly cooked dishes from Puerto Rico to Pakistan for us to share; getting to vote for our mascot and see my best friend design our school logo; and so on.

How I had a difficult but rewarding and informative college experience in a small liberal arts college called Beloit on the Illinois-Wisconsin state line, where I made amazing friends from all places and walks of life, graduated with a killer handmade cap covered with glittery flags, and got to take classes from “Intro to Lit: Desire and Discontent” to “German Migrations,” though I graduated with a Russian major. Or how since college, I feel like I have no home anymore even within the U.S., without a doubt the country I’ve lived in the longest and know the best, because I still feel connected to my hometown of Ann Arbor, and all the family friends I have there who are basically just like family to me, but was living and making my life and path and decisions (both good and bad) in Beloit, but also visiting my parents and sister in their adopted city of St. Louis, Missouri, always bouncing back and forth between the different corners of this Midwestern triangle, always feeling like something was missing no matter where I was, and like I was stretched long and thin across the region and the world.

Most of all, they don’t know how I attended our local “Italian school,” wrote my diaries exclusively in Italian for two years, zealously read books, watched dubbed movies, and went all the way to live with my relatives in Viadana for five months in eighth grade with the explicit and burning desire to recuperate and reinforce my fleeting language skills. How deeply I’ve struggled to improve them, to learn the history of the country and the background of my family, to maintain my relatives’ traditions and contact with them even across the seas that divide my two countries. How much I crave to simply blend in and be completely unrecognizable as an outsider in any way when I do return to Italy, and how, no matter how much I try to not let it affect me, any time I’m referred to as l’americano, told I’m not Italian, or somehow made to feel like I'm different there, it still fucking hurts.

And as I’ve grown, gotten to know myself better, and been fortunate enough to have other experiences in other countries, there are elements that grow difficult to properly explain to anyone anywhere, or to coherently organize even into my own identity.

As a gay man, to some extent I struggle anywhere in the world. Even in places where I can theoretically get married or am legally protected, it might be legal to fire me, or I might be in danger of getting hurt if I move or dress myself the wrong way. And it’s hard to fully render this to other people who aren’t in a similar position as well. I’m lucky to have many loving and open-minded friends of various sexual orientations, and there are even many straight friends I don’t feel like I struggle to explain myself to. But many others are a different story. They don’t know about the liberation and solidarity that came from living in the Sexuality and Gender Alliance, or SAGA House, the LGBT special interest house on my college campus, and the beautiful and varied friends I made there - non-binary and bisexual lesbians, asexual gay men, trans women, and so on - and how much they taught me. How I simultaneously love being a gay man and feel strongly attached to the label and its community and history, and also feel deep discomfort at the sexual assault, racism, and addiction issues that are rampant within it and often dismissed as normal. Or the more simple and mundane aspects of life - how I wasn’t able to fully come to terms with my attractions and feelings I couldn’t control until the age of sixteen. How simply right it felt to sit next to the first boy I had a crush on on the floor of his bedroom watching YouTube videos, and how badly I wanted to inch across the carpet, closer to him. How I’ve never felt safe enough to kiss or hold hands with anyone I’ve loved in a public place - my affection is something which is becoming more present, but is usually demonized and fetishized instead, in media. I’m stuck having to keep my caresses and kisses acts of private rebellion, ensconced within walls and closed doors.

And then there’s the lovely mess of the other places I’ve lived in as an exchange student: Egypt, Turkey, Iceland, Russia, Azerbaijan, and Finland. Of those, I would say I feel deeply connected to and on some level feel at home in Turkey, Iceland, and Finland. Although my experiences in Egypt, Russia, and Azerbaijan were hugely challenging and I would probably not say I ever really felt at home in any of those countries, my experiences there were still informative and are important to me. And it’s difficult to highlight or contextualize aspects of one of those places or experiences in the others, whether it’s one of my two home countries or one I lived in on exchange.

“They,” whoever that is in any given context, don’t know how at home I feel in all the Nordic countries, how much I love their cultures of bookish, nature-oriented introspection and their quiet woods and lakes. How welcome and safe I felt in my Egyptian host family’s home, and how important that was to me during those ten months of living in a place where I was very visibly foreign for the first time. Or how madly I fell in love with Istanbul peering at the view of the sunlit alabaster of its historic quarters and the sapphire waters of the Bosphorus from the window of my flight there from Paris, before I had even set foot on Turkish soil. How I crave and covet all the delicious and mouthwatering foods of these various places when I can’t easily access them: fresh Turkish çiğ köfte in crunchy lettuce leaves; homemade Icelandic skyr with sweetened blueberries; my Egyptian host mother’s mousaka; Russian vareniki from the chain restaurant Varenichnaya; my Azerbaijani and Turkish host mothers’ kurabiye pastries served with their respective homelands’ similar but distinctive types of tea; or Finnish cloudberries with sugar and vanilla ice cream. Or the feeling of arriving in a place that initially seems as foreign as another planet slowly becoming more and more welcomingly familiar until it feels like home. How restorative the tingling is in one’s skin after going to an Icelandic sauna or Finnish swimming pool, going back and forth between temperature extremes to flush out toxins and banish stress. The serenity in beholding Icelandic clifftop waterfalls and steppes leading up to fjord shores, the ancient majesty of the Pyramids of Giza, Moscow’s buildings shining at sunset on early autumn evenings, the busy seaside roundabouts of Alexandria’s Corniche, the faint glow of tentative January auroras in Finnish Lapland, the unparalleled historical beauty of Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia, or the stone carvings of ancient folk’s potential self-portraits in Gobustan outside Baku, Azerbaijan, with one’s own two eyes, and start to feel familiar with and to all of them, a part of the places they define.

They don’t know what it means to abandon every aspect of one’s own, known life, go to a distant, unfamiliar place armed with only cursory knowledge and hope for growth, and struggle through all the difficulties of being far from home and everything familiar - and somehow both fail and succeed.

Many of my friends who are also admirably committed to student exchange and study abroad have worked hard to commit themselves to one language, language family, or region of the world, by studying, say, Spanish for ten years, or working very hard to learn Korean, and then learning Mandarin and Japanese too in order to specialize in East Asia. I can’t quite do the same thing - because the places I love and feel connected to, these sites of my formative experiences abroad, and the languages and cultures I’m passionate about which draw me there, are so varied, multifaceted, and not always very closely connected to one another. I can’t simply be “the guy who studies Turkish” or “the one who learns Nordic languages” or “the post-Soviet scholar.” I’m all of them at the same time and none of them fully. And I’m still not quite sure how best to carve out a place for these indispensable experiences without which I would not be who I am in my own personal identity, and how best to explain them to my loved ones in the other places that matter to me.

At the end of the day, I’ve accepted that in some way, every place I’ve grown to love and feel at home in will be at once familiar and alienating in different ways. And, challenging though it may be, as much as I miss having a more defined and uniform vision of what home is and what it means to me, I don’t mind. I’m incredibly proud of who I am, all the places I’ve come from, the unique confluence they find in my life, and who I’ve become as a result. I may be lost, and I may be from everywhere and nowhere at the same time. But I would never want to be anyone else.