When I was younger, I used to travel in a crowd of beautiful women. I don’t know how it happened but all my female friends (and I am not even sure I can call them friends) were drop dead gorgeous and within a few weeks, my self-image managed to wither away to nothing. At the time, I started playing a game where each time I caught myself wishing I had someone else’s something (like hair or eyes or nose or legs) I would force the issue.

I told myself that the rules were such that I wasn’t allowed to take body parts or personality traits and plug them into the rest of me. If I liked someone’s something, I had to completely change places with that person. Not only did I get their whole body, but I got all their personal issues, emotions, family, psychological state of mind, past, living status, job and anything else you can think of. I basically forced myself to choose between me and this random (or in some cases not so random) person. Yeah, I got to have their small nose or blue eyes, but was I ready to also have their eating disorder? How about the disinterested mom? Was I willing to give up all of who I am to look like this person? It was my way of forcing myself to face the fact that people don’t come in pieces. You want a part, you get the whole thing. How do you like them apples?

In fifteen years, I’ve never met one person I was willing to change places with. I don’t know if it was the fact that I wasn’t willing to give up certain aspects of who I am of my life or the fact that I tend to favor the known over the unknown. Looking at a woman walking down the street, I can see she has pretty hair or a size-2 figure, but I can’t see what goes on in her head or how much she suffers daily. With me, at least I know what I’m getting. Or maybe I was finally growing to like myself.

In a weird way, the game’s done a lot to improve my self-esteem.

I’ve been struggling to figure out where I feel like I belong for many years. I used to think I had two homes and that was okay. And then we moved to San Diego and I’ve been feeling confused and out of place ever since. I miss New York City. I miss so many things about the city that I wouldn’t even know where to begin. For the last six months, I’ve been pining for the City and adding to the already long list of reasons why I belong there and not here.

I don’t think too often about having left Istanbul to live in the United States. I love Istanbul and I am proud to be Turkish but I always knew that I didn’t belong there. There were many variables which limited my life and choices extensively when I lived in Istanbul. While Pittsburgh wasn’t the easiest city to get used to after Istanbul, the college environment kept me busy and entertained. However, moving to New York fit like a glove. The pace of the city is very similar to Istanbul and I already knew many people from either Carnegie Mellon or Istanbul. Within weeks, I also made a group of friends from work. Everything in the city felt like second nature to me; I didn’t have to go through an adjustment period. The subway was extremely easy to navigate, even for a navigational moron like me. Finding like-minded people was never a problem and, thankfully, neither was money.

Before the Teach For America insanity, I had arranged to reduce my Wall Street job a part-time arrangement for two years. I went to work Wednesday through Friday and volunteered on Mondays and Tuesdays. Betweeen the bookstore and NYSD I made friends outside the technical and financial industry. I took classes at NYU, the New School, and other smaller schools all over the city. At one point, I was taking eight classes, volunteering in four different places, and doing my regular job. That was the winter I got engaged and made Vice President. It was also the winter I decided to quit my job and do something more purposeful with my life. Thanks to those two years, I took full advantage of being in New York. I went to book readings, to the opera, to plays, to movies, to art shows, and many museums. I made new friends and walked all over the city.

During the soul-wrenching months Jake and I fantasized about leaving the city. We were tired of the insane lifestyle we lived. We were both miserable at work. We had had a long, rainy, and dark winter. I wanted a house. At least a bigger apartment with a normal bathroom and a normal kitchen. I wanted to travel more and see the United States. I wanted babies. I wanted a yard. I didn’t even know what I wanted, I just wanted out of New York. I was tired. I was worn out. I was ready to move on to a different life. Try something else. Anything else.

We were excited to leave New York. We paid a lot of money to get out of our lease. We had long goodbyes with friends. We packed up seven years of accumulated junk into 70+ boxes and moved it all to Boston. We bought a car and drove all around the country. We hadn’t taken a real vacation in seven years, besides the honeymoon. We took four months off. We drove from Boston to Florida, Florida to Atlanta, to New Orleans, through the Blue Ridge Parkway. We went to the Cayman Islands and went diving for the first time. We vacationed in the South of Turkey with my family to celebrate my dad’s sixtieth birthday. We came back to Boston and drove all over the midwest and the west coast for the next five weeks. We saw over thirty states. We had the best summer of my life. We picked the new city we were going to live in randomly from the map and came here and found an apartment and a job. We settled in. We officially had a new home. A new chapter in our lives.

Everything should have been great. We did all that we wanted to and more. We were able to find a job to sustain the new life we wanted to start. We have a real kitchen and two real bathrooms. We have pools, hot tubs, movie theater, and gyms. Free cooking lessons. Free pilates and yoga. Life is much more relaxed and we live minutes from the most beautiful beaches in the country. Yet, I miss New York. Yet, it doesn’t feel like home here.

I was really worried that five days in New York would make my homesickness so strong that I wouldn’t want to come back. And it did. For the first two days, all I could think of was moving back there. I loved the subway. I loved the streets. The people. The diversity. I simply belonged there. And then the weather turned bad. It poured and poured. I went down to my old job and visited some of my friends. I saw the life they live. I saw the sacrifices they make to earn the money they earn. I remembered the reasons I wanted to leave. I remembered the downsides of being in the city. Suddenly, my intense yearning to be back became more like a fondness for a place I love. A place that will forever be in my heart. A place I will return to time after time. A place that will forever feel like home.

But a life I am no longer willing to live.