We all know the feeling of excitement when we finally get to go home to our families after a long semester. No more tests, no more classes, and no more dining hall food! However, the illusion is shattered after the first disgusted look and snide comment that you get from one of your siblings and you think, “Wow great to be home again!” And then you go into your room and either find out that A) your room has been taken over or B) everything is missing and rearranged. What a great joy having siblings is.
I have three sisters, two older and one younger. They have always been there for me, but we are also at each other’s throat all the time. Growing up, we all fought constantly over stealing each other clothes, hogging the remote, or just making fun of each other. We would chase each other around the house and then wrestle as if we were 6-year-old boys. Since I’ve been at college, I feel like I’ve matured a lot. I voted for the first time, I buy my own food, and I have more freedom than I ever have before. I finally felt close to becoming an adult, but that all went away when I came home.
In the show, “How I Met Your Mother,” Marshall and Ted talk about a term they coin as revertigo. It means to revert and go back in personality when you’re around someone from your past. In the show, Lily and Ted acts like high schoolers again when they were reunited with their high schooler best friends. I feel like this applies to almost all college students when they go home to their best friends at home or their siblings, especially me. I leave college a some-what mature 19-year-old woman and arrive home a 12 or 16-year-old girl once again. For me, it happens more with my siblings because I have a bond with my sisters that can never be replicated.
I think that revertigo happens to everyone when they come home from college and see their siblings. Being around your family and siblings makes you feel different. Your siblings especially make you feel different. The inside jokes, slang terms, and mannerisms, they all are different from the connections at college since you’ve been developing them your whole life. Your siblings are your forever friends, and after being away from them for an extended amount of time, you can’t help but fall back right into your old ways.
