I Don't Want to Talk About Africa.

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 school, and the only home I had ever known.

Everything about my new life felt exciting.

But much of it felt wrong.

People wanted to know where I was from.

"You grew up in Africa?"

Or the question that almost always followed:

"What was it like?"

I usually answered with a sentence or two—probably not the stories they were hoping to hear.

"I don't know... it was just home."

How do you explain a childhood when you have nothing else to compare it to?

I didn't tell them I didn't understand their jokes. I smiled anyway. I laughed when everyone else laughed. I knew they would not get my jokes, so I kept mine to myself.

When they asked about my home, I brushed them off. I did what many people do when they're desperate to fit in. I tucked those memories away where they no longer seemed relevant.

Why had I stopped talking about Africa?

I wasn't ashamed of Liberia. I was just trying to belong. Every new friendship, every conversation required me to learn something new. Later, when my children were older, and I was teaching them at home, I studied American history—its founders, its wars, its heroes and villains. As I learned more stories, I quietly stopped telling the others.

Little by little, I copied the clothes, the expressions, and even developed a Southern drawl. My childhood photographs went to the attic.

Then, forty years later, I picked up a pen.

I began writing about Liberia. About my childhood—and the memories came back.

It wasn't until I began writing that I realized what had seemed ordinary to me was extraordinary to almost everyone else. Spending forty years talking less about Liberia hadn't made me more American. It had simply left me disconnected from part of the person I already was.

Maybe you've done the same. Maybe it wasn't another country. Maybe it was another town, another season of life, or another version of yourself. We all have memories we've quietly packed away because moving forward seemed more important than looking back.

Now I want to talk about Africa.

About Liberia.

About the home I once thought I had lost.

—Georgie