Tūrangawaewae: A place to stand
What does it mean to feel like home?
How’s your summer going? Mine has been a whirlwind. I went to a neighbor’s book reading, plugged away on my writing, and had a friend visit for a few days with her sweet, adorable adventure cat. I brought the family along for a work trip to Washington D.C., where we visited museums, enjoyed delicious Ethiopian food, and slid down the MLK Library. We even strolled through the National Portrait Gallery without a toddler tantrum. I wish I had more time to write, but moments like these make the busy days worthwhile. Also, cheers to cat ladies everywhere.
Tūrangawaewae (Māori)
High school wasn’t exactly my scene. I grew up in a small (well, back then it was small) Texas town, where high school football was everything, bullying was the norm, and being one of three Asian kids in the entire school made me an outsider by default. To be fair, I was also a bit of a weirdo obsessed with alien documentaries and Smash Mouth. Those things didn’t help my cause, but the point is, most of my adolescence felt like living on a different planet.
When I joined the newspaper staff in my junior year, it changed everything. The journalism room became my sanctuary. I still remember what it looked like in there: Clever headlines scribbled on the blackboard. Post-it notes stuck to the walls. Students sat on a red vinyl couch, laughing and swapping story ideas with our journalism teacher. In that room, people listened to my ideas, got my jokes, and introduced me to music that was, if you can believe it, better than Smash Mouth. In the journalism room, everyone else was a bit of an outsider, too, and my weirdness suddenly felt, well, normal.
It’s hard to explain why, but that room felt like home.
A friend sent me a Māori word that made me remember this feeling: tūrangawaewae (pronounced too-ruhng-uh-WIGH-wigh). It translates to “a place to stand,” but it’s much more about the places where we feel comfortable standing. One source describes it like this:
“Tūrangawaewae are places where we feel especially empowered and connected. They are our foundation, our place in the world, our home.”
In high school, the journalism room was my tūrangawaewae. It’s where I felt emboldened to be myself, to let loose. As a teenager, it was the first time I considered that I might not be a total weirdo — that maybe I had just as much a right to stand proudly in this world as anyone else. Even now, decades later, whenever I experience self-doubt, that room is like a touchstone, a reminder that I’m not alone.
May we all find our tūrangawaewae. The places that make us feel empowered and connected.
From the archives
Why everyone thinks their city is best – a look at place attachment: “The places people grow up shape who they are, making it tough to grapple with a new identity when they move. Much of how people understand the world and fit in it with it comes from these places, too.”
Share-worthy
I worked on this Hidden Brain episode about languishing — that strange feeling of “blah” we’ve all felt at some point in our lives — and what we can do about it. “There is something about the sense of getting better at something that makes people feel alive.”
“Being a writer is the best way I know how to get paid for being insane.” Fredrik Backman’s talk on creative anxiety is well worth your four minutes.
Hua Hsu’s memoir, Stay True, is so good that I read it in a single afternoon. I can’t remember the last time I read a book from start to finish in a single day. “The first generation thinks about survival; the ones that follow tell the stories.”
— Kristin
The newsroom was also my tūrangawaewae-- in college! In high school, it was the dark room. Now, ocean and mountains. Thank you so much for this beautiful piece, and fresh vocabulary for describing this feeling!
What a fun interview. Have a Backman book on my nightstand, waiting to be cracked open!