Like just about everyone else, I get shaken when tragedies hit close to home. I remember feeling an overwhelming sense of loss and numbness after the Newtown shootings this December. I had a sense of being incapacitated, unable to face a world in which such unexplainable atrocity occurred.

Being in another country when there’s violence at home is a whole other experience.

Boston is a world away from Turkey. More than that, my list of people who could maybe-possibly-perhaps have been anywhere close to the explosions at the finish line of the Boston Marathon is pretty small compared to a lot of peoples’, and it was easy for me to ascertain that they were all safe within an hour of hearing about the danger. This tragedy is a remote one for me, surprisingly remote for a student who attends college in New England.

But this tragedy is also immediate. It’s right here. It’s looking over my shoulder as I type away in my dorm room in Istanbul. This tragedy, this ghost beside me, makes me feel very far away from my lovely Turkish roommates in the next room, whose Facebook newsfeeds are definitely not filled with condemnations and Mister Rogers quotes and links to increasingly terrifying videos. This ghost reminds me, with a whisper, that while I’m very far from my country right now, I will never be anything but American.

I’ve been thinking about what it means to be American for a while now, and I’ll probably still write some typical “liberal arts student comes to terms with patriotism abroad” piece in a little while. I’ll say something about progress and history and acceptance of  American spirit, and it will be fine and maybe meaningful.

For now, however, I need to write about something else. The ghost breathing down my neck won’t let me sleep until I do.

When this kind of thing happens, someone inevitably brings up other world tragedies. Amidst the frantic, scattered updates about the bombing on my Twitter feed are a few mentions of other acts of violence in the world: people are being killed or injured in Iraq and on a greater scale than the Boston bombing.

I appreciate this. I really do. It’s important to be reminded that the violence that makes headlines is not the only violence in the world and that it isn’t even the most devastating kind. All violence matters, and all violence is connected. We can’t talk about the bombing in Boston without talking about Newtown, Colorado, Oak Creek, Iraq, Israel, Palestine … the list goes on.

Still, I don’t find myself curling into a black hole of melancholy every time the front page of The New York Times relates news of another wave of violence in Syria or gang war in Mexico. No, my nerves, muscles, tendons, and bones reserve their shaken state, on the whole, for home.

I sometimes like to think that I am less stereotypically “American” than many of my compatriots. Probably, I’m at least a little right.

But at times like these, it’s obvious where I am from and who I am. My mind may not know it, but my body does. Those nerves, muscles, tendons, and bones—they felt those blasts at the finish line in a way that reminds me forcefully that I am an American. Those nerves, muscles, tendons, and bones are shaken. They are weak, tired, proud, hopeful, angry, scared, and strong. And they’re decidedly American.

Right now, being American means little more to me than this: America’s struggles, failures, tragedies, and sorrow are also mine. That blood is mine, as is the sweat, as are the tears.

But the triumph is also mine. So is the hope, the forgiveness, and the justice. I can claim some of that as my own. The relieved embraces, the will of volunteers, the brilliance of humanity and community and toughness—they are all a part of me. The runners donating blood, the policemen dismantling fences to get to victims, icons like Kathrine Switzer—these are my people, America’s people.

That’s what that ghost, this sad specter at my side, is here to tell me. It’s here to say that I am a part of something big and  important—a community that can absorb the shockwaves of bombings and loss and that can hopefully come out the other side in peace.