What is Home to me?

In my last nineteen years of life, I have had a number of places in which I have called home.

I consider my first home to be where my parents brought me after I was born. We lived in the top story of a two story house which was shared with a very nice old woman. Most of my memories from that home are with my mom and dad since I am the oldest in my family. A few years later, we moved into another house in the Bay Area in the rural hills. It was dark at night, fairly quiet, and full of wildlife. The wildlife in that neighborhood was my favorite growing up. My fondest memory in that house was learning how to ride my bike and meeting my little brother and sister. After that, we made a big move to Southern California and I ended up living there for about eight years. I thought that I would call this place home for the rest of my life until we moved back to the Bay Area before high school.

The move from Southern California to Northern California the summer before high school was one of the hardest things I have done. I was conflicted about what/where I called home. I had left behind friends and family in Southern California which makes a place really feel like a home, not just a house. On the other hand, I was born and partly raised in Northern California and my parents were happier there. It wasn’t until my senior year of high school, that my house there really felt like it was a home.

Lastly, the move to Eugene was better than I had thought. The thought of moving into a dorm with hundreds of other students scared me to death. I loved having my own space and quiet. However, with the help of my roommate, the dorms felt like home within just a few months. Now, I am settled into an apartment with my best friend and live here ten months out of the year. Now I call this place my home. Home is somewhere where you are surrounded by people you love and somewhere that you can create special memories.

Project

For my “Unessay” project, I wanted to interview people from different parts of the world to understand how similar/different their ideas of home might really be. I wanted to represent this using an interactive, digital map because it helps readers visualize the location of my interviewee. Being able to dive deeper into the idea of home, I have realized that the definition of home will not stay constant throughout your lifetime and it is important to try to see things from different points of view.

You can look at and interact with my project using this link:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1b_ut7vc6PPYKtFRDU3dTtTIELOn47nW1&usp=sharing