Being in college provides an obscure definition to the word “home." While in college, your home becomes your school’s campus. Its people, buildings and surrounding town become a home in and of itself. But while this new exciting place becomes home, something else happens—the long periods of absence from the place where you grew up, inevitably results in that home moving on without you. It changes shape until it really isn’t home at all. Peers are creating their new homes elsewhere, coworkers find new jobs, stores you frequented close, family moves away. And then all of a sudden without you ever realizing it, all the qualities that earned something the title of “home” gradually possess none of those qualities at all.

The houses you and your friends grew up in suddenly have new occupants. Peer groups begin to dismantle. The place that you once possessed at least some ownership over has dissolved—and while the place still exists, deep down you know its not the same place you once loved. Everything that you once held onto so tightly has begun to not belong to you at all.

While all this is hard to realize, and perhaps becomes most obvious the summer after freshman year of college, the worst thing to realize is that you are homesick for a time period that has passed. Something that no plane ride or long phone call can fix. It is the lingering regret that if you had just tried a little harder, kept in touch a little more, held on a little tighter and tried to keep your home together, you really could have. It’s the feeling that if everything stayed the same for just a little bit longer you could have appreciated it more.

We are creatures that need change, but only if it comes on our own terms. The idea that you can spend years carving your spot into a community, creating memories, experiencing love, loss, joy and sadness, only to have it move on without us—forgetting us—is incredibly difficult to comprehend. We want to be the sole catalysts for change. To grow and evolve and leave on a whim—to discover new places, to move 1,000 miles, we want to be the ones to leave big gaping holes in our wake. The process of growing up is nothing more than wanting to grow and evolve ourselves but the world to stay exactly as it is, as we know it.

When you head home and realize your past has outgrown you, it’s incredibly lonely. It’s like heading into the world without that safety net. The place we once held close when homesickness and when nostalgia took over doesn’t exist anymore. It’s no longer a tangible destination. It exists only in our memories, and sentimental reflections with old friends. No longer is there that comforting notion that if everything were to fall to pieces, we’d have our old home to fall back on. All of a sudden we are left alone with our future plans, goals and dreams. We look at home as something that has been fortified for us, rather than something we create.

When it comes down to it, home is not ever a physical destination. Home is nothing more than a collection of memories that warm us. We are wrong to assume that it is an inherent geographical location, because home is neither a place or a time period. Home is a story that we tell ourselves in times of distress—a story of what we can rely on, the only constant in a life that is anything but stable. We attach this idea of home to places, people and landmarks, but never ourselves. We forget that we can become our own homes. Things we are comforted by. Things we can count on to remain constant.

Home is a story line that can quickly become obsolete, but we ourselves never suffer from this. Returning to a place that we have loved and seeing all the ways it is different is perhaps is nothing more than an indication to begin to write your own story of home- to be your own home, because home isn’t the place where you grew up or fell in love or lost your way and then found it again. Home isn’t where you created most of the memories that shaped your childhood.

Home is the place when you figure out your own path. Where you figure out how to be your own home. And perhaps once we figure that out, we will never be homesick again in our life.