Since I have returned home to suburbia this summer, I have noticed that it does not feel the same as it did in my first 17 years of life. It is definitely comforting to be back in the place I know so well to spend time with my parents (and eat home cooked meals), but something is missing. I find myself longing for the hustle-and-bustle of my beloved Purdue. Home is where the heart is, but what if your heart is in more than one place? The connections we form with new places and people can certainly complicate our concepts of "home."
When we were young, we thought of our homes in terms of brick-and-mortar, as physical buildings in which we spent our childhood. Our homes provided us with our basic, biological and societal needs. Parents and guardians gave us roofs over our heads, food to eat, and clothes to wear, all while somehow managing to turn us from helpless bags of skin into functioning members of society. We don't realize what a challenge this is while it's happening, so most of us pass through our sulky teenage stages and move excitedly on to bigger and better things without giving credit where it's due. During these years, we tend to take the comfort of our homes for granted, particularly because we probably didn't have any choice in the matter. Our homes were simply the numbers and letters that created our addresses, the places listed on our driver's licenses and other official documents. At this stage in life, "home" was little more than a formality. Therefore, most of us didn't question what it truly meant.
When we made the big move to college and first encountered the horrors of awkward roommate interactions and one bathroom for the whole floor, many of us had a brief yearning for that childhood home. However, once we became acclimated to the euphoria that is college, we abandoned that homesickness. I feel incredibly blessed, as I'm sure most of us do, to have found a true home in my university. It's not just the fact that I live there nine months out of the year. It's that I feel a sense of pride when I talk about Purdue. I was thrown into a high school based on district boundaries, but I chose Purdue and have developed a life for myself there. I thrive on the daily excitement and grow from the daily stress. My time there is spent with some of the people I love the most. We gain a greater appreciation for those who raised us after leaving our original homes and spending so much time away from them. Luckily, we gain new "family" to step in and fill that void.
During these years, your friends become your family. They're the ones who deal with your whining on Monday mornings, who drag you home after a long night out, and who agree that it is truly tragic when your crush won't text you back. We tend to lean on our peers during college, maybe even more than our families, because they're the ones with you every step of the way, laughing at your antics and lending a shoulder to cry on when you need one. Life at college is fulfilling in a way that's very different than it is back home. For these reasons, it is easy to understand how one could go back to one "home" for the summer and feel homesick for another.
This pattern will only continue as we grow older, as we will find happiness in more and more places. It may be confusing, but having multiple ideas of "home" is actually a beautiful thing. You don't have to forget where you grew up to appreciate someplace new; just make room for more. Poet Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. perfectly summed this up with, "Where we love is home -- home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts." So if you're back in your hometown for the summer and feeling a little incomplete, don't feel guilty. Feel lucky to have more than one wonderful place to be attached to.
