I Am

This drawing was to explore how my sense of belonging has evolved as I attend college abroad over the past three years. Ever since my journey started, my feelings about my “home” became different. It was no longer my home, but my parents’ home where I can always reside. After I left, my parents altered my previous bedroom into a reading room for my younger brother. When I came back, they set up a bed for me in that same room, but everything was different. I was different, too. I would never be that 18-year-old girl who had to ask her dad to pick her up at midnight after the last subway train was gone. Now I can drive myself home, and drive myself to even farther places out there in this world.
When pondering on the question “who I am”, the most satisfactory answer I resonate with is from the German-Swiss poet Hermann Hesse, “I am the sum of everyone I've encountered, everything I've touched, every love I've felt, every pain I've endured—each and every experience has shaped who I am in this moment; take away even one, and I would no longer be me.” At the end of the day, nowhere is the home, but wherever my soul resides.