According to society and the legal system, the moment we turn eighteen, we are adults. I don’t know about you, but the ability to buy a lottery ticket, get a tattoo, and sign skydiving waivers by ourselves doesn’t feel very “liberating,” the way turning 18 is advertised to feel. I don’t think any of us college-aged students feel like full-on adults because to me, being an adult means not being an intern or student-worker. It means settling down in one place, with one job, and maybe a family—if that’s what you’re into. It’s pretty obvious that very, very few of us are at that point in our lives. If you’re like me, this leeway period is sort of unsettling. We don’t know where we’re going to end up—and I don’t mean after graduation, I mean within the next year, or maybe even in the next three months.
This period of our lives includes a lot of packing, and unpacking, am I right? We live at school for most of the year. Sure, there’s winter break and summertime at “home,” but is it really home when we’re only here for a few months at a time? And what if we have an internship out of the state next year, and we get even less time in our hometowns. The what-ifs are endless because there's really no way of determining where we're going to be-- there's no way to plan for this. It feels like we have to cut our lives down to suitcase-size; living out of boxes or laundry baskets because it’s physically impossible for us to live in one place for more than three months straight, maybe six, if you’re lucky.
For the majority of us, we’ve lived in one place for our whole lives. Maybe two or three with childhood moves. But, even with those moves, we’re always living with the same people, and that in itself is kind of settling, isn’t it? We have our families, and in essence with them is our home. But now, we don’t see them nearly as much, let alone live in the same place as them. Stop to think about it, it’s a little scary just because there isn’t really a constant anymore. Our entire generation, we’re nomads, moving from one place to another, with different people at different times. While it’s a huge adjustment for everyone, especially for the freshman in college, I do believe there’s a way to find peace in that.
If you’re ever getting down, ever feeling like you don’t really have a place to call “home” anymore, try not to think of this as a bad thing. There’s a reason why the generation above ours calls this “the best years of our lives.” Sure, we have to move around a lot, but isn’t that the best way to learn about the world? We all say we want to travel the world someday, and while our broke-college-kid-selves can't always afford that, this period of our lives is essentially the adventure we've always craved. We get to meet different people, learn things we could never learn if we stayed in one place. Try not to see it as unsettling, but freeing. There's no way of determining where we're going to end up, but that also means that our possibilities for success are infinite. We all go to college with the dream of making something out of ourselves, and we definitely can’t change the world by sitting in one place.
We have the rest of our lives to sit in one place with the same house and the same job. That part of our lives will come with a whole new set of challenges, but we’re not there yet. Right now, we’re living out of suitcases. We’re making new friends, and connections with other people that will be worthwhile and lifelong. We're living in new places, and gaining a perspective on life that will mold us into who we really are. Our values, our dispositions. This is the point in our lives when we have the most potential for our futures. They say that “youth is wasted on the young.” So let’s appreciate the nomad years—find peace amidst our chaos—and prove them wrong.
