In the summer before my freshman year of college, life threw me into a world of unfamiliarity and change. My parents and I were moving out of the only home I’d ever known and I was about to embark on Year One of supposedly the best four years of my life. Being uprooted from my quiet, Chinese-American Brooklyn neighborhood and living away from my parents was overwhelming and I resented them for forcing so much change on me. It wasn’t ideal to spend the days before orientation trying to sort 17 years’ worth of material accumulation into three categories: New House, College Stuff, and Weird Things I Collected as a Child and Now Need to Fit in the Garbage. I began to associate change with a loss of identity and maybe this was underscored by constantly having to give this speech every time someone new asked me where I’m from: “I grew up in Brooklyn, but my parents moved to New Jersey like two weeks ago so I guess I’m from New Jersey now, but I don’t necessarily claim that to be my hometown. I mean, I do NOT identify with New Jersey.” Not that there’s anything wrong with New Jersey, but it’s certainly not Brooklyn. And this is where most people see that just like every other New Yorker, I have a complex.

Two years later, all is said and done and it leaves me in a precarious place. Cumulatively, I’ve spent more time on my college campus than in New Jersey and when I dream of going home, I see my childhood bedroom in Brooklyn. Despite my previous aversion and resentment towards change, two years on a small liberal arts college campus will do wonders for a person’s need for something, ANYTHING different. Swarthmore is my home away from home, but just like any healthy relationship, I need some space. I don’t know what it is I’m searching for in Stockholm, but I know it’ll be exactly what I need somehow. I’m not naive enough to expect that Stockholm is going to fill the void left by leaving my childhood home, but I know it’ll come to be a different sort of home for me. I’m standing at the edge of a cliff, two weeks away from finally making the jump.