At 2 years old, this is me on the lawn of the home I was born in.

Well, more specifically, I was born at the campus hospital of UIUC, the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. Since that first ride from the hospital to my home, I can’t count how many times I’ve moved.

The anomalous part of my “moved around” trope is that I’ve only lived in three towns but was constantly relocating within each zip code. In Urbana, I first lived in my quaint one-story home with only my mother and father for company. After three months, we moved into a larger house, “living quarters” provided by my father’s company to reduce commute. From there, we moved one more time to an apartment while my father was in the midst of a massive career decision and finally packed our bags for Peoria, Illinois.

In Peoria, our lifestyle hardly changed initially- we’d moved from a tiny town to a small one, into an apartment nearly indifferentiable from the one we’d lived in previously. To this day, none of my family members can discern the two apartments from old family albums.

Within Peoria, we moved two more times, then to my personal favorite home- the house my twin sisters were born in. We lived in that home for 5 more years until the small town became too cramped for our now-large family, and my father’s career needed a pivot once more.

On March 16, 2017, we moved to the Peach State. Within Georgia, we moved around in the same zip code 3 times, beginning with a cozy townhome to an in-between rental home to the house I’ve lived the longest in, a total of 7 years, where I went through middle and high school, began to develop myself, and found my lifelong friends.

All of these homes gave me an interesting perspective on a community; seeing different towns from a plethora of vantage points showed me that diversity in the masses is what keeps a place colorful- without differences on a socioeconomic scale, a town will always lack a particular soul, a feeling you can almost feel in the air of a vibrant city.

As I’m typing this about me page, my family is back home moving once again, so it seems my “moved around” trope is here to stay for now.