“Where are you from?” It’s always been one of the hardest questions for me to answer and it feels as though it’s the question I have heard most after the standard, “How are you?”

I was born in Albuquerque, NM, so my answer should be an easy one, but I only lived there for two years before my family moved to Dubai. We spent four years there before continuing on to Estonia, Sweden, Azerbaijan and Mexico, with a few other stops along the way. We wouldn’t return to the US until I was a teenager, when my parents accepted positions at the University of Wyoming. At the end of my sophomore year of high school, when my older sister and brother had already left the nest, my parents decided they wanted to go abroad again and I, wanting to graduate in the States, went to boarding school in Indiana. I went to college in California, completed my masters in the U.K., taught for two years back in California and am now a PhD student in the U.K. again.