My first week of college, I held such hatred towards my dorm room. It was small, with prison-cell style walls (thanks, Weinstein), and most of all it felt far away from my bedroom at home. At the beginning of the first semester though, I would end up staying in my room too much, but it didn't feel enjoyable or like a haven for me. Instead, I felt miserable every second that I spent in my own dorm room-but how could this be?
As I began to meet new people and start my classes, I spent less time in my room. I tried to spend as much time as possible now away from this space that I had never "clicked" with in terms of comfort during my first few weeks of school. Even though I was spending less time in my room, I still felt an inexplicable dislike for my room-practically to the same extent I had felt this when I spent a majority of my free time in my room.
I can't exactly recall a specific day when I finally loved (or even liked) my room. It wasn't an instantaneous thing, and it also wasn't a consistent, gradual increase either. There are no sufficient means of explaining how or when this shift took place, but I can say this much: now, my dorm is my home away from home. It doesn't feel like a space where I simply sleep and often do homework on late nights, but instead, it feels like a space of refuge from the tumultuous day of classes and everyday chaos that comes with both going to college and in living in New York City. It feels extremely strange as I sit in my residence hall and begin to think about packing my things in the next week and a half. There was even a point that I sat in my room and was practically moved to tears as I considered moving out and leaving this space so soon. The fondness that I feel for this room that had initially been nonexistent is so different from the strong sense of dislike that I had for my dorm room at the beginning of the year.
The simple answer would be that I adjusted by making the room "my own" and adding small little mementos and pictures to make it feel "homey". However, I don't believe that these things alone can make a room truly feel like your space. I instead believe that this shift in sentiment came with the experiences that I had in New York and the love that I have for my school in the city. We can attempt to hang up our fairy lights and put up tapestries to cover up the hideous walls, but what truly defines our sense of connection to our dorm rooms is a mature understanding of the definition of home. Home is often defined as where your loved ones are - and in college, this statement seems to offer paradoxical advice, since going away to college entails a distance between you and your family. However, home is much more complicated and more multi-faceted than this definition. Home is where we work on ourselves, where we can fully express ourselves, and where we feel a sense of peace. My dorm room specifically feels like my little bubble that connects me to New York City and NYU itself. No matter how much we complain about the small space, the chipped paint, or the poorly designed heating system, there is an undeniable sense of emotional attachment to the first space that is "ours" and "ours alone" (with the exception of a roommate) in an entirely new neighborhood, city, state, or even country.
