When I sit down to write, it's ideally in a big-cushioned arm chair with a foot rest stationed below my heels and a hot coffee within a fingertip's reach. I like to be comfortable. I have the same mentality when it comes to content, especially when I am writing something outside of a structured school assignment. I like to write about what I know, because I figure that's what I can do best. 

 

So, when the first task of the Gateway Writing Minor class asked me to "repurpose" a previous college assignment in any way I want, it wasn't a surprise that I was drawn to a short essay I wrote the first semester of my freshman year about my love for my hometown - Hermosa Beach, California. What's more comfortable than home? It turns out a lot of people, or at least people my age, agree. When I ventured out to see how my fellow college students perceive the concept of home for my remediation of that essay, "comfort" was undoubtedly the most common word used.

 

What was not consistent, however, was each person's experience of home. I went into the project assuming that the people I spoke to would be able to tell me where their hometown is and how living in that place has shaped their identity, like it so vividly happened for myself. I was wrong, and I should have expected that.

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I spent the semester in a Medical Anthropology class, a discipline in which one of the fundamental principles is not knowing in advance. It's the understanding that nothing can be understood, and therefore nothing should be assumed, until you're in the field observing the realities of the lives you are studying. You question your own questions, and often throw your hands in the air with a confident "I don't know," all with the goal of creating a better account of the world. 

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These lessons held true in my own mini ethnographic account of people's perceptions of home. So, with each new interview, I had to continuously question my own questions and make sure that I wasn't entering any conversation assuming any aspects of someone's life story.

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The more people I talked to, the more I realized how much my own perception of home really has shaped the way I understand the entire world, and I used these new insights to alter my repurposed essay.  A daunting  but meaningful undertaking, this experience taught me a lot about myself as a writer, student, and person navigating my life as it seems to encounter more and more crossroads every day.