This summer, I was beyond excited to return to my hometown and have three-months with my friends and family after having been away for so long. When I got there, it was blissful. I saw my friends every day for the first few weeks and was caught up in the nostalgia following my first year at college.
Then, my online classes started, my job started and I simply ran out of time to do the things I had spent a significant portion of second semester thinking about. I never got to go on a disastrous hike with one of my oldest friends, I never played the True American game from New Girl, I barely did all of the things I wanted to with my siblings.
While thinking about all of the things I didn’t do towards the end of the summer, I found myself remembering something my parents had said to me a few years earlier that I never thought would apply to me:
“It is so hard to come home again.”
I always thought that I would immediately get back into the swing of things when I returned home, but that was not the case this time. I am from a small town in a small state and I traded that in to go to a large school in an even larger city. What I realized was that I am no longer the same person I was when I began my first year of college.
I have not had any “crazy” college experiences that changed me, it was more the everyday aspects of making such a drastic change all at once. Last year, I had a lot of loose ends, decisions that had been left up in the air when I came to school. Over the course of the year, I found solace in the idea of coming home in order to tie those loose ends up. When I was home for shorter periods, it was blissful, but this summer gave me plenty of time to realize that I am thousands of times happier at school. I reflected on this through the course of my creative writing course over the summer and came to find that living to redefine your past is no way to move forward.
That is how I know that I have made the right decisions; I have found my people at school and I believe that I have found my place too.
Cheers to finding your new home.
