We Must Take Adventures to Know Where We Truly Belong.

"Some people think that they were born in the wrong era, I think you were born in the wrong area."

-Something Sarah said to me yesterday that struck me.

After graduating high school and moving off to uni for a few years, "home" can be a very hard concept to grasp. If you're like me, you have lived your whole life in the same room, same house, same town, with the same people. When it came time to move to uni, "home" was supposed to become my dorm room...but that absolutely did not feel like home. The strangest part was, that when I did go home-home, it didn't feel like home either. I was in the place that I had always called home, but I was living out of a suitcase...it didn't add up.

I always had expected everything to be the same as I left it when I came home from uni; my high school, the people in the community, the businesses around the county, but they weren't. They were foreign and this really confused me. How could I feel so alien in a place that I had always called my home? 

But to be honest, I had always felt out of place there. I had always felt as if I should be somewhere else, as if I was "born in the wrong area." Ever since I can remember, and I honestly couldn't tell you when this obsession started, I have been in love with the ocean. Everything about it seemed so fascinating to me. My room was ocean themed, and I wrote pseudo-research papers about dolphins when I was 12. 

This obsession with the ocean quickly started to include an obsession with surfing as well. I made my mom bring home the Bethany Hamilton poster from the high school when I was in junior high. I worshipped Mick Fanning and claimed Creatures of Leisure was my favourite surf team. Because of this I was made fun of a lot. People would say things like, "Have you ever even surfed?," and "You're from Iowa, act like it."

This made the feeling of home become even more foreign to me. All I have ever wanted is to live in a beach house in a beach town, with a cat and an Alaskan Malamute, with tons of house plants, a bike, and a surf board with a job that I don't have to look fancy for. 

I guess what I'm trying to say, is that I have never been somewhere that feels more like "home" than here in Australia. As crazy as it sounds, it almost feels like I belong here. I feel more myself than I ever have before. I used to try to fit myself into different molds and never really knew who "I" was. I was so terrified of being judged and being abnormal, that I never let people see who I really was on the inside. Here in Aus, I am finally living the life that I've always dreamed of living. 

Yes, I do miss all of my family and my friends from back home with every fiber of my being, and I would never be able to survive without them in my life. But if it weren't for them, I would never leave here. I think I've finally found "home."