I started Challenge Detroit a little under a year ago, at the end of a long, hot, lonely summer. I was obsessed with cleaning up the dust and sand that blew into my apartment from the windows. I was working in birmingham, and nervously drive to-and-from work on Woodward, since the 75 made me nervous. I was freezing during the day in the office; boiling in my 4th floor apartment during the evenings. I had a lot of ideas about what I wanted my life to be like, but was mainly focused on the fact I knew only a handful of people in all of Michigan. I felt lonely a lot, and was nervous all the time; at work, during lunch, driving, at my house. My lack of connections felt isolating and unsettling; every minor disappointment or hiccup felt earth shattering. Once, I got caught in my first midwestern rainstorm and my car hydroplaned down Woodward. When I finally got home, my hands shook for an hour.

I had a lot of ideas of what sort of place Detroit was. These ideas were mostly academic; I understood Detroit’s problems from books and articles I read, I felt privilege as a status of economics, not race. I was idealistic about Detroit’s future growth and sustainability: We can do it! Why not?

My first months as a fellow was fantastic. The weather cooled, my apartment became bearable; I could close the windows and keep the grit off my floors. I had friends and events to go to after work! My job moved downtown and I could bike to work, no longer nervously changing freeway lanes. I got broken up with, turned 23, sang a lot of bad karaoke, walked back from Kirsten’s apartment across Woodward, grey, empty and quiet. I found the confidence, joy and freedom that I felt had been missing from my time in college. Every morning, I rode my bike downtown, the bright wind in my face, grinning. Where I had once felt isolated and nervous, I felt connected and woven into a large network; there were, friendly people everywhere.

I’m not sure if a city means anything, if geography or place is anything more than just a sum of all the relationships you make there, with friends and strangers. If a city is just a collection of people, if Detroit is just a collage of the interactions I’ve had in the past year, then it is a good place. I am, ultimately, happy to be here. This shouldn’t be surprising; kind people live everywhere, in every city, every suburb, every country. I’m a little disappointed in myself that it was surprising to learn, that people who look different from me, believe differently from me, who speak differently than me, who live in homes that are different than mine, were (of course!) generally good.

I’m not sure what the future holds for me and Detroit. Early in the fellowship I realized that I was not passionate about my good job in marketing and graphic design. For the past five years, I’d thought about becoming an architect, but it scared me. There was math, and a hard job market and the fact that I’d only known a couple architects and they all complained about their jobs. On our third date, Ben stopped me mid-sentence as I was explaining the history of Brush Park, and said, why don’t you study architecture? I didn’t have a good answer.

A (then) stranger I met at Third Street Bar told me I should look into Columbia University’s Intro to Architecture program. By late April I had been accepted; by June, I had finished my job, moved out of my fourth floor apartment and sold my car to pay for tuition.

The program was, as promised, intense and incredible. I pulled all nighters, spent every single day in the studio, fell into my old art school habits of obsessing over tiny details and listening to decades-old episodes of This American Life. I was so happy, finally being able to work at and focus on ideas and concepts I’d been idly working at in my free moments during the past year.

As the plane descended over Michigan this Friday, I stared at the cloudy, green gray landscape rising to meet me. Intrinsically, Michigan isn’t really my home, I’ve only lived here for a year, and don’t plan on attending grad school here either. I’m not really midwestern; I miss the mountains and mossy forests I grew up in. But for now, Detroit and Michigan feel like home. Its the first place I truly chose to live by myself, the first place I felt comfortable and free, my first apartment, a safe haven I had dreamed about since I was 12. Next door to my pre-war apartment, I met Ben, a complete stranger. On Detroit’s streets and surrounded by mounds of snow,  we shared stories of living here, discussing sociology, geography, architecture, the particular emotions of the houses we live in, the cars we drive.  Ultimately, Detroit is the place I began to fall in love, where I began to learn how to be truly empathetic, how to share, how believe that the strangers around me are good people. It’s where I confronted a lot of my academic, distant ideas about problems of wealth, privilege and race; I began to feel and see how those problems tore apart neighborhoods, cities, and homes. The empathy I gained while confronting an America so foreign from my own changed me. I learned more in the past year of living in Detroit and working with Challenge than I did in four years of college.

So when I finally landed in Romulus, I couldn’t stop smiling. I was home.