When you’re growing up, all you can think about is turning 18 and getting to move out. Trust me, I felt the same way. But when it comes to turning 18 and moving out, you wish you were 10 again and could stay home. Almost everyone wants to move back home at some point in their lives-- whether they do it or not is up to them and their parents.
At first, all you can feel is this overwhelming feeling of freedom. Freedom from being told what to do, when to eat and how to act. It's great-- you can be yourself and do whatever you want!
It also comes with great responsibility. You now have to take care of yourself, feed yourself and do your own laundry. It's almost a shock, at least for me it was. It was like, “wow, now I’m really an adult.”
All you can think about when you’re away from home is how much you want to go home. I know I definitely miss my mom taking care of me and doing my laundry. I miss home cooking and family parties. I miss the birthday parties and all my family.
But it's all worth it when you finally do get to go home. It feels so good to hug your family members and to sit down and talk about college or what you’ve been doing lately. When I went home for the first time, it felt as if I was staying at someone else’s house. I felt almost as if being home was like staying at a hotel, but at the same time I felt like I never left home.
When you go to leave home, it's difficult-- but it will never be as hard as when you left the first time. The first time you leave home, you feel like you’ll never go home again, even though you will. When you leave after a trip back home, it's kind of like you just went on a short vacation and now it's time to go home (and by home I mean college).
After a while you’ll start to call your dorm “home.” In reality, your brain knows it's not home, but you just start calling it that because that’s the closest thing you have to home. I do it all the time, and then I realize I called my dorm home-- by then I can't take it back.
When you’re away from home for long periods of time, you become homesick. When you do go back home, you become what I call “dorm sick,” which is basically like homesickness but for your dorm. I have only been “dorm sick” once and I can tell you, I wanted to just be alone for like five minutes. After that, I was fine.
Being away from home is something we all experience, and it's okay to go through it. We’re all humans and we’re all going to go through similar things. So it's okay, be home sick. Be “dorm sick,” because we only get to be a freshman in college once.
