Chapter III
“All light is one,
but colors a thousandfold.”
— Fakhr al-Din Iraqi
Today I turn thirty.
When I look back, my twenties resemble less a timeline and more a map: airports and train stations, borrowed homes and unfamiliar languages, friendships formed in places none of us were meant to stay forever.
I was sixteen the first time I crossed an ocean alone.
My English was fragile then. I carried a small green Russian–English dictionary and translated the world word by word, sentence by sentence, trying to keep pace with a country that seemed to move much faster than I did.
Teenagers laughed, of course. Borat jokes were unavoidable. Some were convinced Kazakhstan was not even a real country.
What I wished I could explain was the country I carried within me. A place where strangers are welcomed into kitchens without hesitation. Where families gather every Friday to bake bread and remember their ancestors. Where the smell of sagebrush from the endless steppe lingers in memory like something sacred.
Once my azhe told me:
“Whenever you feel homesick, close your eyes and imagine our wide golden steppes.”
When I close my eyes, I can still hear them. The quiet melody of the earth.
Before leaving, I asked my grandmother for her blessing.
At first she refused. She worried about sending a sixteen-year-old girl across an ocean alone. A week later she changed her mind.
That was the kind of woman she was. An orphan of war. Married young. Never taught to read or write. Yet she carried a quiet revolution inside her: all her daughters would leave the village and receive an education.
And they did—teachers, doctors, engineers.
My mother became the first generation of women in our family to attend university.
I became the first to leave the continent.
What followed was a life my grandmother could not have imagined: scholarships, universities, international career, continents layered upon continents. A path that carried me through Kazakhstan, the United States, the United Arab Emirates, Ireland, Portugal, Austria, Poland, Japan, Denmark, and now the Netherlands. But somewhere along the way I began to understand something important.
The real journey was never outward.
It was inward.
At some point in Abu Dhabi, I realized something strange about belonging.
Those years shaped my intellectual life in ways that still echo today. Many of my closest friendships were born there. We now live scattered across continents, but that time still feels like a constellation that never quite dissolves.
NYU Abu Dhabi was also the place where my curiosity about the world deepened in unexpected ways. Through classes and fieldwork, I found myself studying land reforms and women’s rights in India, learning how communities use art to process the trauma of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and walking through Kathmandu trying to understand how cities distribute public goods and resources across their populations. Those journeys were not just academic exercises. They were windows into how history, power, culture, and resilience shape the lives of communities across the world.
It was also there that I realized something quietly unsettling: I no longer had a single home.
Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that my home had lost its walls.
Choosing the path of a wanderer brings a rare kind of freedom. But it also means accepting that your search may never reveal a shore or a visible horizon. It means learning to live like a ship on the open ocean. You become comfortable almost anywhere, among almost anyone. And at the same time you come to accept a quieter knowledge: your home no longer belongs to a single country.
What remains are these quiet fragments:
The smell of freshly baked bread.
The bitter scent of sagebrush on the steppe.
The sound of swallows cutting through a blue sky.
A familiar voice calling your name.
When a vessel sails long enough through open waters, it begins to forget whether home ever had a point of departure, or a point of arrival.
Travel began to feel different after that realization. I understood why journeys gave me such a deep sense of relief. Not because of arrival. Because of departure. Every train, every plane, every bus carried the same sensation. It was like I was shedding a skin. A quiet elimination of what was no longer needed. A small death that made space for another beginning. I realized I have always loved elimination more than accumulation. Movement never felt like escape. It felt like renewal.
During a semester in Accra, Ghana, another door opened in my understanding of the world. I listened to stories about mental health, about communities trying to care for those whom society often forgets. I spent time with artisans, with musicians, with women entrepreneurs in Makola Market whose resilience carried entire families. My professors challenged us to question the invisible architecture of the world—how global institutions shape the destinies of nations, how colonial histories continue to echo through modern economies, how systems that appear abstract on paper are lived by real people in their everyday lives.
That was when something shifted in my thinking.
I began to see that systems are not merely structures. They are human lives woven together. And perhaps my small calling in this world is to help those systems bend, however slightly, toward fairness.
Over time my sense of spirituality also began to evolve.
I grew up with prayer as something familiar, but the more I traveled the less confined it felt to a single tradition. I began to sense the presence of something sacred everywhere: in forests, in quiet city streets at night, in the strange stillness of a plane suspended somewhere above the clouds. I can pray in a mosque, a synagogue, a Russian Orthodox church. What draws me to Sufism is its simple understanding that the divine is not distant. It moves through every visible and invisible thread of existence. Prayer, then, becomes less a ritual and more a state of attention. A way of remembering that we are never truly separate from the world around us.
Art has been another quiet compass. One moment in particular remains vivid.
On a solo trip to Naoshima Island in Japan, I entered the museum designed by Tadao Ando where Monet’s water lilies hang in a vast white space. Silence. Light. Paintings suspended in time. Standing there, I felt something rare: the sense that someone from another century had reached across time and understood something about being alive that I could not yet articulate. Moments like that engaging with Art remind me that beauty is not something we merely observe.
To see beauty, we must also become it.
There are quieter truths that travel has taught me. Airports, for example. Every month or so I arrive somewhere new. Crowds gather behind the arrival gates—people waiting with flowers, signs, open arms. Most of the time, no one is waiting for me. Those moments carry a subtle loneliness. But then I remember the airport in Kazakhstan, where my father always stands waiting when I come home.
And suddenly the world feels balanced again.
Fear has also become a kind of compass. Many of the most important turns in my life began with fear: fear of failure, fear of discomfort, fear of choosing a path that might change everything. Over time I learned that growth rarely hides in comfortable places. Sometimes the only way forward is toward the very thing that frightens us.
Fear, when listened to carefully, can become direction.
And perhaps the most important shift in my thinking has been this:
I no longer aspire to identities.
Not a career woman. Not a title. Not a role. Instead I aspire to states of being: warmth, love, clarity, courage. Identities change. Titles appear and disappear.
But the deeper work is learning how to inhabit those qualities wherever life places you.
Thirty years have passed.
Ten countries have shaped the person writing these words.
As T. S. Eliot wrote in Little Gidding:
We shall not cease from exploration,
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Perhaps that is the quiet truth of wandering. We leave in order to return, and not to the same place, but to a deeper understanding of who we have always been. And somewhere far beyond the steppe where my grandmother once gave her blessing, the journey inward continues.
