“The neighborhood waved and said,

‘Nina, be brave, and you’re gonna be fine!’

And maybe it’s me,

But it all seems like lifetimes ago,

So what do I say to these faces that I used to know?” –“Breathe” from In the Heights

Considering I’m from a small Michigan town that’s 90 percent white, it seems odd that one of the songs I most relate to is from a musical about a diverse, largely Spanish-speaking neighborhood in Manhattan. But Nina and I are both first-generation college students, and “Breathe” beautifully encapsulates that experience, by showing that first-generation students don’t just struggle to fit into a new world—we struggle to still fit into our old ones.

From the outside, being the first in your family to attend college seems unequivocally great. Using your grit, you’ve beaten the odds, and the future is bright. Much of this belief comes from loved ones and community members. My dad repeatedly tells my sister and me, “You’re our future.” To quote another song from In the Heights, “I've spent my life inheriting dreams from” them. What so many of these well-wishers don’t see—or do see but selflessly accept—is that moving up in the world also means leaving them behind.

It’s natural to grow apart from your parents as you get older. For first-generation students, this drift is heightened. There isn’t merely a generation gap between me and my parents. We inhabit entirely different worlds.

While I was in college, my friends often had their parents advise them on which classes to take, the parents sharing which books they’d had on their own college syllabi. My parents couldn’t even say what classes I was in each quarter - not because they didn’t care, but because there was no need for them to know. They had no frame of reference for classes like English Renaissance Literature and the Poetics of Place. They just trusted that I was doing well academically, as I always have.

I could rarely share with them what I was learning in class. I have never seen my mom read a book from cover to cover; it would mean nothing to her and my dad if I said that Baudrillard’s “Simulacra and Simulation” changed the way I viewed the world. When my parents visit me in Chicago, I struggle to find things for them to do, since the museums and theater I’d usually choose don’t interest them. They’re content to go to Navy Pier or admire the Bean and the skyline, marvels that are now passé to me.

Over family dinner after I returned from study abroad in London, I bubbled about my independent research project on the Blitz. (I had wanted my parents to visit me in London, but neither of them had a passport.) After I went on about the ruined churches I visited and the survival of St. Paul’s in contrast to the destruction of Paternoster Row, my mom quipped, “I’m sure that’ll be very useful for me as a hairdresser.” On paper, that remark sounds callous, but that wasn’t her intention. She wasn’t judging me for my enthusiasm for history. If anything, she disliked herself for not being able to share it. When she works 12-hour days to make up for my dad’s unemployment, at a physically taxing job she’s been doing since she was a teenager, she doesn’t have the energy to focus on anything else but making it through another day. Literature and historical facts won’t help her with that.

When my family cheered me on as I applied to college, did they realize exactly the sacrifice they were making? That, in pushing me to succeed, they were also pushing me away? I don’t remember thinking about this as I started college. My main concern was adjusting to this new world where people read literary criticism for fun and vacationed abroad every year. I took for granted that there would always be a world waiting for me back home, a world I could comfortably slip into like my fraying pajamas, as if I hadn’t changed at all.