A reflection on exchanging books with fellow TCK author Anna Redsand, reading Crevice: A Life Between Worlds, and what her perspective taught me about listening to stories different from my own.

Thirty-three years after leaving my childhood home in Liberia, I went back. What I found made me think about the places that become part of who we are—and why something in us still longs to return.

Leaving a country isn't always the hardest part. Sometimes the biggest challenge is learning to live as though the place that raised you no longer matters. For years, I didn’t want to talk about Africa. I never actually said those words out loud. But that's exactly how I felt. At seventeen, I arrived in America—my parents' passport country—with two suitcases and a lifetime of memories that no one around me seemed to understand. I had left behind my family, my friends, my scho