To foreground the importance of a narrative approach in exploring issues of wartime, I utilize autoethnography to investigate my interest and commitment to the topic of wartime, which stems from the many attempts to find personal answers, fill in the holes in my family history, and piece together collective silences and secrets surrounding everyday experiences in conflict. Thus, I provide a nuanced understanding of the intersection of my personal lived experience as a child of war and an international scholar and researcher in the U.S. academe who engages with war, trauma, and the role of cultural storytelling as personal and collective healing. Most importantly, I bring to light the complex processes of writing and research, and the attempts I have made to make sense of how to tell stories of conflict, belonging, trauma, and healing. Through engaging in this work, I offer an important perspective of a population often overlooked in peacebuilding studies: non-Western peacebuilding scholars whose experiences are often relegated to the periphery of the Western academy, even as they remain dedicated to peace efforts despite the many institutional, material, emotional, and mental obstacles that come with this undertaking.