When I hit about 16 years old, I knew I had to get as far away from my small hometown as possible. I looked into many, many colleges ranging anywhere from Washington D.C. to Colorado. When it came to where I was going to go to school, I only knew one thing for sure: I HAD to get out of my hometown.

I grew up in what I would consider to be a small town. I graduated with 198 people in my class. I knew everyone's names and most of their stories as they walked across the stage. I graduated from the same high school my mom went to and some of my teachers even taught her too. Where I'm from, you could meet new people at work or at a party and somehow you would soon discover that you shared a mutual friend. You couldn't even run to the grocery store without running into at least one person you knew.

And I absolutely hated that.

When I was 18, and I knew the world, I HAD to get as far away from little old Mansfield as I could. And now that I'm away, I want it back.

Little did I know that moving away from home, away from your friends and family to a city that you don't know, and that doesn't know you, is terrifying. To me, the idea of moving somewhere where no one knew anything about me was fascinating. I wanted so badly to reinvent myself, to find who I was away from the comfort of my friends and family. I tried very hard to make my college town my new home, but the longer I'm here, the more I realize that it will never truly be home.

Home is where your family is.

Home is driving down the street and being able to think of a memory or a story for nearly every location you passed. Home is being able to take back roads and different routes to your best friends house because you've been there a million times. Home is where your childhood pets are buried in your backyard, where you can go to a football game on a Friday night and run into your favorite teacher from high school, and where you don't have to take a GPS to get anywhere.

My mom always said that out of all of her kids I would be the one who would never end up back at home. But, the longer I'm away, the more I realize it's where I want to end up.

Don't get me wrong, the past two years at college in Cleveland have been amazing. I have met so many amazing people, learned how to cook and clean and to take care of myself. I now have bills to pay and pets of my very own to take care of. My life here can be summed up seemingly perfectly by the song "Don't Forget to Remember Me" by Carrie Underwood (and I would be lying if I said I didn't cry every time I listen to that song.) But the most important thing that Cleveland has taught me is that I will never be a city girl the way I always thought I would be.

I always imagined myself as a 30 something-year-old dropping my kids off at their private school in my pantsuit and pumps in my Range Rover and living in a little house in a suburb outside of a huge city on a busy street. But now, I want my future kids to grow up like I did. I want my mom to babysit my kids while I'm at work, just like my grandma did for me. I want them to go fishing with their dad as I did with my dad. I want them to be able to play outside barefoot in their huge backyard and to learn how to ride their bikes on a deserted street, not on a street that is clogged with traffic every day from 4-6 pm.

For as long as I can remember, everyone has told me to "get the hell out of Mansfield" and that "there is nothing here for me." But those people were wrong. Mansfield is home. And it's where I want to be.