A couple of weeks ago, I wrote an article called "11 Reasons Why I'm Excited About Going Back to John Carroll." Flash forward to the present and I am happily settled in my dorm room without AC and already low-key crying about my 18 credit hours. The thought of ever not being at John Carroll is an odd one. You come back as if you have never left and pick up the life you left behind three months ago.
That's the thing about having two homes. No matter where you are, you will always be apart from one of them. When I am in the U.S., it seems as if the Netherlands is just a distant memory of a life once lived. When I am in the Netherlands, however, everything surrounding me is so familiar and acquainted that I sometimes wonder if my other life in the U.S. is even real. It is as you are going through a portal into a whole new dimension, a totally new and different world, once you cross the Atlantic Ocean.
Thankfully, I have been blessed enough not to suffer from homesickness. "Do you miss your university?" and "Do you miss home?" I get asked quite frequently. I have come to realize that neither is the case. When I am at John Carroll, I just get lost in the grind of classes, homework, extracurriculars and friends that I not once have missed my home town. When I am back home, I am so busy catching up with everyone, spending time with my family and bunny and picking up where I left off that college doesn't even cross my mind. I tend to focus on the environment I am in at the moment, which makes me numb to my life in the other world.
I have to say that it is weird to have two homes in two different continents, but at the same time it has something special about it. I have come to realize that life in general contains so much more than I could have possibly imagined. The world out there is different and mesmerizing, but at the same time, all of us are surrounded by people just like us. We not only resemble people that live close to us, but we have more in common with people that live on totally different parts of the world than I, myself, could have ever held imaginable.
For which I prefer? I don't know. Every place has it good and bad qualities. Benefits in one place, may be disadvantages somewhere else. It sounds cliché, but home is really what you make of it. You can't get a home presented to you, you build it yourself.
