I think you travel to search and come back home to find yourself there.

Venturing into the world is often seen as a rite of passage, whether it’s leaving the family home or moving to a different continent. For MacArthur Genius Grant recipient and award-winning author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, leaving her home country of Nigeria to live in the United States, and traveling around the world to promote her books, began a journey to find herself. Whether a sense of wanderlust is inherent in us or not, exploring beyond the life we know, filled with familiar people, is one path to discovering who we really are — which elements of our cultural identity fit and which we prefer to leave behind. As Adichie observed, it’s the journey that helps us find who we are, and discover where home really is.