Where is Home to You?

My piece explores my evolving understanding of the concept of “home.” What began as confusion during a second-grade writing assignment has turned into a meaningful journey of self-reflection. Through literature, dance, and lived experiences across multiple cultures and countries, I’ve come to understand home not as a location, but as an internal sanctuary—something rooted in peace, expression, and emotional connection. I was inspired to share this story because I believe many young people around the world also struggle with this complex question.

—Leah Hyolim Lee, age 14, New York.

The question, “Where is home to you?” is a deceptively simple yet profoundly
complex inquiry. Every individual has a unique interpretation of the question. For some, it may evoke a geographic answer, rooted in soil, and for others, it is a neutral blend of cultural heritage and personal experience. For many years, it remained an elusive enigma, a landscape shrouded in both familiarity and fog. At times, I found myself blaming my diversity and uniqueness for my confusion.

In the second grade, we were required to write an essay, and the prospect of my first major writing assignment filled me with curiosity and joy. My eyes were laser focused on the green basket, which contained a mix of cards. Each of them read a different prompt, and that promise of individuality planted a seed of anticipation and interest in all of us. I daydreamed about the type of subject I would be given. I lost myself in reverie, imagining every scenario possible that I could think of: all of which I knew fully what the answer would be. Would it be a fantastical prompt that required me to use my imagination, or a historical viewpoint that I needed to assert my opinions on?

My trance was broken when my teacher’s voice cut through my thoughts like a razor. With each step towards the teacher’s table, an unmistakable sense of nervousness rose within me, an almost tangible tension that coiled around my chest. When I finally read what was written, it put me in a place of unexpected confusion. What had once seemed so simple now felt like a labyrinth, where I was trapped in the maze lost in disorientation.

It read, “Where is home to you?” in bold unforgiving letters, and I found myself frowning as my footsteps grew shorter with a loss of hope. Thoughts buzzed around in my head like a swarm of restless bees, each one darting from idea to idea, stinging my mind with urgency.

The sharp chime of the bell sliced through the quiet like a sudden gust of wind. As I
looked down, eraser marks and salty tears took the place of words that I prayed were there.

From then on, I subscribed to the conventional image that a “home” was synonymous with a tangible, physical space. I chose to take the easy way out, as I fantasized about a beautiful house, where the rhythm of belonging hummed softly to comfort me. However, each time my family moved countries, my picture-perfect image became increasingly fractured, like a mosaic of pieces that never quite held together. I wondered if my odd life was not deserving of something like a home.

I was met many times with silent criticism from others when I tried to answer the
question, “Where are you from?” Random words spilled out of my mouth, as if they too, were uncertain of their purpose and destination. I felt the unspoken implication that my origins, divided and shifting, were less valued than those steeped in singularity.

The more I bloomed into a more mature individual, I came to realize that I should not have pushed myself into the shadows as I lived in confusion of who I really am. This new perspective was the start of my own journey to sanctuary.

I began to fall in love with the world of literature, where I found a peculiar sense of home in the novels that I read and in the movies that I watched. I embarked on adventures with Huck and Jim and went on a frivolous journey with Chris, Gordie, Vern, and Teddy. The ink and paper seemed to embrace me with the warmth of familiarity that became a refuge where the chaos of the world fell away. The characters’ struggles, triumphs, and moments of reflection mirrored my own, creating an unspoken bond. A thread of shared experiences wove us together into the fabric of human existence.

Through this discovery, I often found myself perplexed. How could a mere assemblage of paper and ink evoke the sense of belonging that I had longed for? How could a world, spun from the loom of imagination, offer such a welcoming hand? It forced myself to confront my sustained belief that a home was a structurally defined place.

A home, as I experienced, can also take the form of an art style. I found shelter in a studio, with its polished floors and mirrored walls, which became a sacred ground. It was not the studio itself that gave me a sense of home, it was how it housed a place where I could express myself in ways that I had never before, where I was both the performer and audience. Through ballet, I learned an entirely new language that spoke to me in a way words never did.

The rhythm of my breaths and the breaths of others synchronized into one. It was a silent but meaningful indication that the mere art form of ballet had brought me both a place for sanctuary and fictive kinship.

The Oxford Dictionary defines a home as “a place where one lives permanently, especially as a member of a family or household,” which is a seemingly straightforward and static notion. Yet, I find myself at odds with this definition, as it enforces the idea that a home is a fixed place, an address, and a place in which an individual is anchored for a lifetime. Even as I challenge the dictionary’s definition, there are moments when I long for the permanence that it reflects and when I yearn for the comfort of knowing exactly where I belong. My own internal diversity has led me to this hard fought journey, where I am able to confront my own definition of where I belong. My belief continues to evolve, but for now, I live by my own definition that a home is not measured by the land beneath my feet, but by the peace within my heart.

By Leah Hyolim Lee, age 14, New York.