Unless you were lucky enough to go to a boarding school like we all dreamed of doing because of "Zoey 101," coming home during the summer after living in a dorm for nine months can be a huge adjustment. I don’t want to pull the teenage angst card, but these three months are something that not many people really can understand or put into words. So, that’s my job.

As soon as you walk in the door, you have a slight bit of PTSD when you remember what you went through before you got home. The last three weeks of school are always the most stressful, with acknowledging your grades before you head into finals (which sometimes is the worst part), setting goals to get those grades up, studying for finals, trying to experience the fun things in your town before you leave for the summer, packing up your room, spending time with the seniors before they leave, getting finances cleared, and getting rooms finalized for next year. Where did you even find time to do all of this? But you did it -- you jam-packed your schedule full from 8 a.m. to 2 a.m., you passed your classes (or, hey, you at least took the tests), and now you’re out.

You sit down in your comfy full-size bed in a room that’s all yours, open your laptop and realize your brain is now absolute mush. You’ve pushed it to its absolute limits, and it’s just a ball of goop inside your head that tells you when to eat, sleep, and go to the bathroom. This is a change that can make you very stressed -- now what is there to live for? Your crappy job at the grocery store? Cleaning the house over the summer out of pure boredom? Relearning all of Latin 101 and 102 for fun just because you didn’t actually learn it the first time? The anxiousness that you had at the end of the year about passing has now turned into anxiousness about how to be as productive as you can. I’m talking real anxiousness, to where your blood pressure rises whenever you hear the word “resume,” or when you think of how you should start learning ahead for your fall 2016 classes -- just in case.

Then, there’s the whole new you that’s sitting at the dinner table, and you accidentally tell your parents that you went to see Bernie Sanders at your school. Oh, no, now you’re one of them, you realize. It’s inevitable: we change our ideals and think we can save the world because we’ve been exposed to the world that’s bigger than just our high school. We are fed to believe that we are the chosen generation who can make this world a better place. You come back home and cringe because there’s no recycling. You look at the pantry and are upset that there’s no organic food in there. You watch "Batman vs. Superman" with your family, and on the way home you get into a discussion about how the movie was actually about the corruption of America as it loses its godliness, and your parents roll their eyes while your little brother covers his ears when he knows you’re about to get into some deep analysis of something that’s really only a basic concept. Your whole world is yours to analyze, but all your parents see you as is a new-generation liberal.

You come across a meme that your roommate would find funny, but she’s no longer there across the room for you to readily see her laugh at your inside joke. You finally watch the movie that your friend has been suggesting since the beginning of the school year, but she’s in Iowa and you’re in Illinois so you can’t meet for coffee like you had been every Tuesday. You finish a book, but your professor can’t discuss the character motivations with you. Your campus is no longer readily available to you, which is a downer, but what’s even worse is being states away from the people who you’ve made connections with for the past two semesters.

Let’s not even get into the, “so how was college?” question that you’ll hear form your whole community. You put on a grin and say that you love college but you can’t help but focus on the hardships of learning how to take care of yourself, having only acquaintances as compared to having real friends, getting mostly Cs in all of your classes (which are the most challenging courses you’ve ever taken) and being in thousands of dollars of debt at age 19. The first few times asked you’re excited to tell people about how college went, but after that you start to realize that not everything was happy nor easy. But you lie, anyway, and say that it was all good, you love the campus and the people and the opportunities. You’re spending money to go there and better yourself as a person or whatever, so these better be the best four years of your life.

The loss of independence isn’t necessarily as irksome as it is simply inconvenient. Telling your parents that you’re going somewhere every time you leave is something that you always forget to do. Going to a friend’s house past 10 is unheard of. Having your laundry folded a different way than what you do makes your drawers unorganized and abiding by a family schedule is something that you might as well keep a planner over the summer for. Your parents buying you a different brand of shampoo is such a nice gesture, but you also know that your hair will most likely explode once you go out of the door.

But when you’re coming home, you get to take showers without flip flops, you get homemade meals that are made exactly the way you like them, you can blast your music, you can open the window before making sure that all your roommates are awake, and you can always get a hug from your mom if you need it. The friends from home that you have kept through your first year of college are those friends that you will have for a lifetime, and you get to be with them the whole summer.

You have time to work at a job so that you can buy yourself some Panera if you really want to spoil yourself, and you won’t feel as guilty about those $7 lattes as you would when you were unemployed at college. Everything at home is familiar to you. There are no people to impress. After the initial stressful move-in phase, being home for your first summer after college is one that is more humbling than anything. You’re brought to your roots. You’re surrounded by people who know you and why you are the way you are.

The surface-level relationships can wait until August because your family and best friends are there to genuinely listen to how your first year went and wish you the best as you head into your second year away from home. This support system is something you’ll have your whole life, so don’t take it for granted while you’re there for the summer.