My name is Moea, I was born in New Caledonia where my dad is from, and grew up in Tahiti where my mom is from. I left home at 18 to move to France where I lived for seven years.

When I was younger, I thought that living on an island was suffocating and sterile for my young creative mind. I was constantly feeding off the fear that nothing awaited me, shriveling to the impulses of the claustrophobia that was haunting me. I know that many people growing up in small places share the same feeling, whether they live on an island or in a rural place. All I could think about was fleeing the insularity I grew up in. So when I finally hit 18, I answered the most primary call for freedom and adventure that was raging in between the knots in my stomach. And just like that, with absolutely no plan in mind, nor desire to get into a school, I took a plane and started my new life, putting oceans and thousands of kilometers between my childhood and me.

I arrived in Paris and was immediately seduced by the endless possibilities that could turn my life into nothing I could have even imagined. I remember this surreal feeling of being in a crowd, a huge crowd, that got renewed every day. Being lost in a big city, knowing that behind every face I saw was an entire individual, and that I would probably never see the same face again. I tasted for the first time the experience of being no one, unrecognizable, with no bounds to anchor my sense of self, and with it came the first real sense of freedom I had ever possessed.

From a deeply rooted desire to cut myself from where I came from, I put all my will into building my own persona, drowning in the endless sea of the unknown. I enjoyed exploring all the facets of Paris, the beautiful ones and the darker ones too. An immense part of who I am today has been sparked there. Paris was the third home I had known in my life, and what a place it was to start adulthood!

Even though I did not fully identify with my home’s culture, I quickly realized I could not identify with the French culture either. But one of the perks of living in a big city is there are many diverse communities you can fit into, no matter where you come from. Paris is a place where people come and go, they come to dream, to try, to experience, and they leave for all the same reasons. For so many people living there, Paris is a temporary home, a refuge from all the things we leave in our home countries. I found that finding a community was much easier than having to adhere to a culture, and Paris being such a melting spot, it was way easier to find my people and to build a sense of belonging.

For the majority of my time living there, I only had a few French friends. Instead, I got into a community of Brazilian people, and found myself right at home. We shared many similarities in our way of living. We ate the same fruits growing up, lived in an endless summer, did not do very well in winter, and we all came from a history of colonization. Life is so beautiful in all its irony, it makes you take such complicated routes to understand the very beginning of where you started.

I had to leave my islands, move to France, and meet the Brazilian people in the middle of Paris, to begin to grasp the circumstances of how I was brought into this world as a result of centuries of immigration and colonization. By learning about the history of Brazil, I was offered new perspectives about the world I came from. I learnt about politics, about the process of decolonization, and I learnt to discern the systemic issues

that surround us all in our day to day life.

The history of my ancestors from China and Java got lost in their perilous trips to immigrate in the Pacific Ocean. Whereas on my French side, I have access to my family history which goes back to the Crusades. I come from two islands and have no indigenous blood from either one in my veins, and to this day I find it difficult to have a sense of belonging, as I could not claim an identity from the land, nor the culture of where I was born. I just could not understand how I could come from so many places and none at the same time. But that is the story of colonization. And if we go back in time enough, isn't it the whole world’s story?

As much as I wanted to build myself an identity that only reflected me as an individual, the one thing I could never escape from was my name. “Moea”. My Tahitian heirloom. Only 4 letters but so difficult for everyone to pronounce. When I met people, it was the door that inevitably led them to where I came from, a constant reminder of where I belong. I dreaded these questions as I did not really know how to answer them, and found a great injustice in having to justify my name and my roots. I later understood that these feelings only came from the struggles of evolving in worlds I felt like I did not belong to. How could I build my identity when I was putting so much effort in dissociating myself from where I came from?

As a child of the islands, I have always known that I would have to leave some day. To get a better education, to gather skills and knowledge, to better myself with the experience of traveling abroad. But I never planned on coming back. I used to have panic attacks at the thought of returning back home. I had this irrational fear that I would get stuck somehow, lose my passport, and never be able to leave again. As hard as life could get when you live across the globe from your family, I needed to make my own path. Even when my mental health started to deteriorate, I couldn't bring myself to betray my journey and go back. My stubbornness eventually led me to feeling stuck in France, as the only thing keeping me there was my fear of going back home. I realized how hard it was to pave my own way as I was in a constant flight. You just can not build anything while you are actively running away.

It took me seven years of adventure, of doubts and joys, so many lives I’ve lived with so many different characters, to finally find peace with my roots, and reconcile my story as one. In January, I decided to move to Tahiti, the place I grew up in. It had been ten years since I left my island, and I suddenly realized how homesick I was for so many years.

I can finally tell my story as a whole, not as fragments of resentment that I desperately try to make sense of. And my story is the same as many persons’. Leaving home to engage in a quest for belonging, searching for one’s self by discovering the many cultures the world is home for.

I could have never imagined that this quest would lead me home, and I think that is what freedom is about in my journey. To be able to embrace my future as fully as I do my past, and more than anything else, to be able to leave without running away.