It’s the end of May, and you’re home from college for the summer. It was a bittersweet parting with campus, but overall, you’re glad to be back home for a while. Only once you’re settled in at home, you realize that it doesn’t feel normal anymore. Being at home doesn’t feel like “being at home,” and getting into a routine is almost impossible. You are used to the scheduled life that is college, the people you see every day, and the comfortable “college” life that you’ve carved for yourself. Only now, there are no papers to write or exams to take, your friends live in other towns or states, and that comfortable “college” life has been blown to bits.
You’re not supposed to feel that way, right? I mean, this is home, this is where you grew up, this should feel normal. Only it doesn’t. That anxiety about oversleeping, homework, or tests is gone because all that’s over for a while. I’m sure that’s a sigh of relief to you, but it still feels weird because that anxiety and scheduled life is just what you’re so used to now. Getting up in the morning and not having something pressing to do is both a welcome relief and a strange emptiness. You really just don’t know how to function without having something that requires your immediate attention.
College and its stresses, become a way of life and it takes some adjusting to figure out how to function outside of that bubble. You just feel a little lost there for a while. Your social life is probably non-existent because, first off, you’re tired and want to hibernate a little bit. Once you’re over binge-watching Netflix and feel somewhat refreshed, you find that the people from your hometown are either busy with their own lives, or, more surprisingly, you find that you just don’t want to socialize with them because your interests have changed since being away.
You find that your opinions now differ from people you’ve known all your life, because being in college exposes you to people that you would never in a million years encounter in your hometown. You startle at the fact that you’re mentally disagreeing, perhaps very strongly, with a person from your hometown over some world issue. Those people and the people from your hometown have a vast gap between their beliefs, and you are still trying to figure out where your opinions fit in, or even what your opinions are.
You miss your friends from college, because there’s a bond that forms between people who are chronically stressed that you didn’t realize was there until you find yourselves apart from one another. You never would have imaged that you would have such a deep bond with someone that you have only known a few months, and that the person from high-school that you’ve known your whole life just does not compare in the slightest.
Summer break, especially towards the beginning, is when your brain finally has a chance to rest and digest all of these things mentioned. You figure out just how much your ideas have expanded, how much you’ve grown as a person, and just how much you’ve changed in general. You and your mind are a bit at war over what you’re “used to” being and what you now “are.” Embrace it, because you're finding yourself.
