After an all-too-indulgent weekend, I climbed into a Lyft at San Jose Airport, headed back to my apartment in Palo Alto.

“Headed home?”

I stumbled a little. “I’m…both going home and coming from home,” I finally mustered. That morning, my mom raced to Burbank airport in rush hour traffic. I boarded exactly twelve minutes before the flight was scheduled to take off. As we drifted up and over the San Gabriel mountains and up the coast, the landscape reminded me: this is home.

This past week I finished my first year of graduate school. Admittedly, it was more emotional than I imagined it would be. I didn’t turn in the last paper feeling like the stress was barely beginning because the grade is what matters. Letting go felt like permission to celebrate an accomplishment- staying in the room when things got rough. After I turned in the paper, I turned on the Dodger game, threw some clothes in a suitcase, and started a memoir I’ve been hoping to read all year. I kept telling myself it was ok to enjoy a few hours of no commitment.

What does “home” have to do with the PhD program? I could be studying anywhere, but I’m back in California like I hoped. That same night I finished, a student who will start the program in the fall sent me a message. “You finished! What is your biggest piece of advice to a first year?”

Part of me wanted to say, “You have no idea what you’re getting in to. Even if you have a Master’s Degree, you have no idea what kind of caliber work is expected. And how many hours a day you’ll spend reading, or preparing, or formulating a single sentence.” But I didn’t say that, because what use would that have been to me nine months ago? I probably would have cried a little and moved on without any real wisdom. So instead, I said what I truly wished someone had told me before I started, which is how lonely this work can be. This might sound obvious- you read and write all day? Of course these activities are done solo. But the detachment from a community can deeply affect even the quality of our work.

It was really the writing class in the winter quarter this year that helped me expand my purview of “home.” As the weeks went by and we joked about how #transformed our writing would be by the end of the class, I started feeling like maybe this was something I could do. Maybe I could even be good at it. That feeling came from the work of building community based on appreciative critique (though some days, critiques escalated to strong words) and well, internet memes. The point is, I began to see how crucial it is to involve others in every step of my thinking.

I remember the day I walked into our writing professor’s office. “This isn’t the paper I want to write,” I confessed. “I really want to write about how patriarchal and white interfaith dialogue spaces are, and how I think we can do better.” She jumped from her chair and handed me three books. “It’s like you’re talking to three different fields,” she said. “This could be helpful to so many people.” At the end of the day, I’m carrying on in the long nights of reading and early writing sessions because I do want my work to be helpful. Feeling at home means I talk to the people for whom it will be useful and finding my voice in the meantime.