What moving out on my own has taught me:

I woke up by myself today, in a condo with only a handful of my belongings. No mom vacuuming too early in the morning or brother rushing around the kitchen. No dog growl-barking at the wall in a manner reminiscent of a horror movie clip. No noise. Just me and my thoughts.

I instantly turned on Netflix and got in the shower, filling the empty void with a collision of noises that could have been conjured up by a family, let alone one small person. Something I used to cry about — the lack of silence in my home — is now something I find almost disturbing. It brings about the realization that I am no longer in the house I have grown comfortable in, and am instead learning to forge my way away from the people that have been present in my every day life.

I am 24 and I just moved out. I spent a lot of time crying over the fact that I would be leaving my mom with an empty room and the sad reminder that her firstborn got married and flew out of the nest. I worried that my younger brother would miss daily intrusions into his life while he was just trying to play Xbox, when the reality is that I drove over to visit them almost every day since moving out.

It is exceptionally difficult for me to deal with permanence, evident by my lack of tattoos and overwhelming anxiety with choosing a college major, so finally packing my clothes and placing them in a closet alongside the work-shirts of my husband woke me up in a way I have yet to have ever come close to experiencing otherwise.

At one point I commuted over an hour to my university and avoided moving out to save money, meaning that I have never had a real roommate, I never played in the lottery of living with strangers and I never had to wonder what it was like to do all of my own grocery shopping.

Being a grown adult and finally leaving your parent’s home is an eye-opening experience allowing you the joy of discovering that you are always trickling slowly into adulthood, that there is never a singular moment that defines growing up.

I learned to make my first real gourmet meal one week ago, and found the bliss in cleaning my kitchen. I made address changes, reorganized a dresser, decorated my living room and let a grin spread across my face as my sweet man came through the front door after work.

I still don’t quite know what to do about the silence late at night or early in the morning — the eerie loneliness that paws at my chest and urges unyielding thoughts to plague my head. I find myself searching for the creepy noises that would crawl into my old room at two in the morning, and wonder when I will ever go through the day without playing a comedy track or allowing reruns to dance around on whatever TV is in my room, but I’m sure — like me — one day that will change as well.