Coming home after your freshman year of college is enigmatic. For the last year, you have been living more or less independently. You have made a slew of new friends. You have adapted to life in a new city and learned to love a new place. Now shipped back home, you are left with no guidebook on how to adjust to your old life. Whether you like it or not, your home life went on when you left -- for better or for worse. Maybe things are exactly how you left them, or maybe things have taken unexpected turns.
In your dorm room, you have learned to cook, clean and fend for yourself. But now, returning home means being back under the watchful eyes of your parents. You have the responsibilities of living amongst your parents, and that means living how they are used to living. This means your room may need to be cleaned and your bed may need to be made. Also, it means that you owe your parents an explanation for where you are at all times, and you are not allowed to come and go as you please. Your room does not function like your dorm room -- it lies inside of your house, falling beneath your parents' rules.
Another weird part of coming home is falling back into your high school friendships and understanding what that means. Away at college for a year, people have changed. It can be hard to reconnect with the friends whom you may not have kept in touch with. It can be hard to remember what your old friends are like and the role that you played in your friend groups.
The other hard thing is keeping in touch with the friends you made in college. Many of your friends will be dispersed around the country or maybe even around the world, and there is a large disparity between living with and seeing these people every day, and not seeing them for months. Missing friends are hard. Keeping in touch with friends is even harder.
Another challenge you'll face when coming back home is the fact that you leaving the place, the city, the campus, that you learned to love over the last eight months. Just when you begin to feel comfortable and to really settle into a routine, you are uprooted and sent back home, to deal with the changes in your reality. You may now need to share a car with your sister who has gotten her license, you may need to deal with new tension in your parents' relationship, you may need to get used to your Dad being around the house as he looks for a new job. Life moved on when you were away.
Coming home is nothing short of weird -- and no one tells you that it is going to be. You expect to come home and be swept into the routine of your life, but even if you didn't notice or didn't mean to, you changed when you were away at college, and home might not feel exactly how you expected it to feel.
