The first thing you're asked when you return from college is, 'Did you miss home?' to which the answer is yes, I did miss my friends and my parents but my town...that's a different story.

Let's call my town Rosewood after the town the "Pretty Little Liars" live in because that's how I describe my town to people.

"Have you seen Pretty Little Liars? You know their town full of pretty people and large houses? Yeah, that's my town."

It's a small suburbia tucked away in the middle of New Jersey that most people drive though to admire. The literal mansions turn heads, the colonial architecture in the center of town stuns, and it seems like everyone knows each other...because basically everyone does.

As of 2016, my town had 4,988 people in it. We all know each other's business. It's like living in a perpetual high school with business big-wigs, gossiping mothers, and little kids too spoiled to function by themselves playing with iPhones that were released yesterday.

The 'popular' cliques in the high school hold raging parties on the weekends that police and parents turn a blind eye to. The typical first car for a teen is a Jeep, BMW, or Mercedes which is driven down to their grandiose beach house the second it becomes summer. It's just the life of a Rosewood resident.

Coming back home, going back to my job, and just walking around my town makes me realize how much I don't know what's going on underneath the shiny surfaces of these people. I overhear gossip between grown adult mothers that makes me want to shake them and tell them there's life outside of the Rosewood bubble.

I want to tell them that where I go to college, wildlife is dying in the most polluted lake in America, homeless people sleep under overhangs, and gang violence tears apart families. But if I tell them, they'll wave me away and tell me they understand. Rosewood residents acknowledge these problems, but they seem so far away that they almost disappear from view.

Anything outside of the bubble doesn't have to exist if you don't want it to.

But coming back to the bubble makes me count my blessings and realize that I'm so lucky to live where I live. I'm fortunate to have a roof over my head, two grounded parents who are doing everything they can to put me through college, and food in my refrigerator.

I don't have a Jeep, BMW, or Mercedes, nor do I have a mansion. I just have a one-floor ranch-style house at the end of a cul-de-sac where I live with the best people on Earth. I'm lucky to know who I know and lucky they realize the idyllic bubble they live in.

If there's one take-away, it's this: There's a world outside of the bubble that make the problems on the inside become insignificant. We could all do with sticking our heads outside and smelling the fresh air.