Although we do not always see it, something significant happens when we leave home and start our adventure away from our comfort zone.
I like to think of the picturesque suburban community I grew up in as a snow globe. The type of trinket you see in a Hallmark during the holiday season. A charming neighborhood with children playing in the cul-de-sac, a place where you have dinner parties with friends on weekends, and laugh until your sides hurt outside on the patio with your siblings, to me this is what I called home--my perfect Hallmark snow globe. I felt safe in here. This is where I grew up, found my best friends, brought home my first pet and made my memories. High school football games, homecoming dances, and sleepovers, all took place right here within this glass dome. My snow globe was the perfect setting for my first eighteen years at home, but I knew it would soon shatter and I would have to rebuild another one when I started packing for college.
Leaving home can only be compared to shaking your snow globe as hard as possible. The white flurry of the snow encompasses what is familiar to you, finally settling to reveal that a new environment now surrounds you. College is a different type of snow globe, one that has yet to be explored. When you leave what is familiar, you tend to change as an individual but little parts of you and your mannerisms from your old home now follow you onto your new adventure. Discovering your new “college edition” snow globe, will take time, but it will be the best 4 (or 5, I’m not judging) years of your life as you continue to do so.
One must step outside their comfort zone in order to explore this new college town. This will be your new home for the next few years, so you might as well discover this new oasis in your globe as soon as possible. From the cliffs to the crimson brick academic buildings, Greek row, and the Palouse, you will soon match memories to names, faces, and places. This new snow globe will become familiar where you will experience all new kinds of “firsts” while at college. Your first friend, recruitment week, college class, party, and football game-- all special in their own way. You will soon see yourself less as a student but more as a Pullman townie.
For me, the beauty of living in a college town located in the middle of hundreds of miles of wheat fields is that you are fully emerged in everything taking place on and off campus. This snow globe effect is where friendships grow stronger because unlike the city schools, we do not have the luxury of going into the city to shop, eat at popular restaurants (we miss you chipotle), or see our parents on the weekends but the pros of living in this “promise land” of college towns vastly outweighs the cons.
My snow globe is continually evolving as I am growing as an individual while at college. I am no longer in the familiar surrounding of my life back in the suburbs. There are areas I have not discovered yet here-- places I have not explored in my new home. Every day I create new memories in my snow globe and when the time comes for me to leave this town to start my real “adult” world, I will put up this beloved snow globe filled with the echoes of laughter and memories on my shelf, next to my others and start all over again with an open mind. Leaving your snow globe is scary, but it is worth it every time.
