Since leaving for college, I seem to have been unable to captured a sense of home.
Growing up, you feel a strong connection to your home town, your school, and your childhood. You learn to develop a sense of self, based off of these experiences of family, school, and home.
Then you go to college and everything changes. You move away from the comforts of home; from a high school you thought you'd never leave, a house in which you know every nook and cranny, and everything is turned on its head.
College feels like summer camp for the first few weeks. However, as the months trundle onward, reality sets in. This is your new home, your new life, and your new normal. This new home is filled with freedoms and unimagined learning opportunities, but it is also unknown. No matter if you moved ten minutes away or 1,000 miles, you have now become a foreigner in both your hometown and your new college town.
Because when you come home for the summer, everything feels off. Places you used to frequent now leave a strange twist in your gut. The nostalgia hits you like a ten ton of bricks, strong and unrelenting in the memories of your former self and former lifetime. But they feel oddly foreign now. They are ill-fitting but still recognizable, like trying to fit in a shirt that you outgrew years ago. It’s uncomfortable and often confusing.
It is not only the places, but the people. Of those whom you knew in high school, some have adapted to their new life beautifully and have discovered things about themselves in the process. While others have chosen to remain in the past, always talking about the "glory days" and speaking with nostalgia lighting up their gaze.
Because those places and that time feel so achingly familiar, it is easy to fall back onto it and remain a comfortable ghost of a past existence. But I do not wish to remain haunting my past. I wish to keep exploring my life and although it is a difficult thing to accept, your childhood home is no longer your home. It is a spirit, a representation of your upbringing, but not a reflection of your life now. Family and friends are still there, offering support. But it is your job to make that shift. You are simply moving on to the next chapter of your life, the older chapters not forgotten, but not lingered on either.
Some places bring a grounding kind of fondness out of me while others are rejecting me like a bad organ. No matter the memories that inhabit my mind when I walk through well remembered places, they cannot bring back those times, and I do not want them to. Life is about moving on and accepting change, no matter how difficult. For we cannot haunt our pasts forever…
and who would want to?
