Moving back home from college is an odd transition. You expect it to be easy since you're already familiar with home. I mean, I've only been away for less than a year! But something about being under your parents’ roof again and returning to the old life you semi-left behind when you started college is hard to get used to. Here are just a few things that I have noticed since I have been home.

My room at home is excessively large.

I feel like there is a freaking echo in here…did I really think that this was once a normal living space? Its freaking huge!! There is so much room for activities! I can spread my arms out and not take up half of the room! I feel like I could run laps around this place.

There is So. Much. Food.

I walk into the pantry and it feels like a grocery store. Everything I could ever crave is in there. Five different cereals? Check. Three tubs of peanut butter? Got it. Ten bags of different chips? Yes sir, its all there. How do we possibly consume this much food? I have no idea but I am not complaining after living off of Hot Pockets and Keurig coffee for the past 9 months.

Privacy is a weird thing.

Sharing a room with someone else and constantly being surrounded by people is something that you get used to. And after having a community bathroom, I even became acquainted to showering with someone else in the room. Coming home to a whole room and bathroom that completely belongs to just me…it's lonely now. Where is my roomie that I had a year long sleepover with? And the 20 girls I shared a toilet and shower with? I miss y'all.

My family has been a family without me.

I have come home to visit, sure, but day to day I haven’t been here. My parents and sibling have learned to be a family while I was not in the picture. The whole dynamic has changed. The light of their life, me, left and therefore things were shifted around. New inside jokes were made, the chores around the house are done differently, and arguments that they have been having for months are new to me. Having to shove my way back into the spotlight has been no issue at all, but definitely a task I had not been anticipating.

I have no idea what I did before college.

Coming home I have a different routine. But what is it? I have all of this newfound time on my hands and a lack of friends at my immediate disposal. What the heck did I do with all of this empty time before I left for college? I could probably write a novel, run a marathon, create a cure for cancer, and discover a few new scientific elements in the time I have spent laying in bed by myself on Netflix this week.

Holy crap, I’m ¼ of the way done.

It seems like just yesterday I had 20 card board boxes packed up and was one checklist away from a mental breakdown. Freshman year feels like it literally just started. Why am I now sitting here done with this year and a sophomore in college?! What the heck is that?? I am just one year closer to having to be in the adult world with a mature job and paying bills and stuff. I don’t feel ¼ of the way prepared for that so I don’t know how I am already that close. School sucks, and I complain about it a lot, but when it comes down to it, it is the only excuse I have left to make mistakes and be stupid. Time is flying by, just like everyone said it would.