Going home for the holidays from college can be a stress-free and joyful time, because you are not having to deal with studies at school, and you also get to spend a long break with your loved ones. Although, as much as we all love to go home for the long holiday break, most of the time we are happy to be home for about a week, and then all of a sudden, we start missing our 'home away from home'.
College is a weird time. One day you can hate your life because you have a paper, a speech, and an exam all tomorrow. But on some days, you are having the time of your life and you never want to leave.
The holidays seem to signify what college is all about. Most of the time, people tend to stray from home when they go to college, so getting to go home and spend some long awaited time with the family is never an upset, but then after a week or so, we start to miss our other family. The family we chose. Our friends that we chose to be there for us at a much needed time in our lives when our parents, friends, and other family members from home could not be.
It is hard to balance the two, especially when you have friends from other states that are hours away. You want to go visit all of them because a month is just the right length to begin to really miss them, but you cannot because there is not enough time during the break, and you still want to spend time with your family at home. The holidays seem to remind us why we longed for months to go back home and enjoy our time with our family, but then as soon as we go back home, we get reminded that most of our friends live hundreds of miles away. The 'family' that you have had around you for the past four months is no longer with you everyday and something just feels off.
Now do not get me wrong, it is hard to be away from your actual family during the semesters while in college, too. However, as a person who is supposed to be adulting and learning to grow up, this is part of the consequences that people quickly learn to live with. Being away from parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, and cousins is something you eventually learn to handle by yourself, because you have to be an adult and grow up, right? College is an influential time, and the people you choose to surround yourself with at this point in your life can have a major impact on you as a person and where you decide to go in life. Therefore, being away from these people when you are with them 24/7 comes as a sudden shock that nobody ever feels ready to deal with.
You feel off because it does not seem right that the family you got to choose is not around. You spend the holidays with your family, and they are your family, so they should be there too, right? College is fun because it gives you the experience to meet people that become your chosen family, that your actual family learns to love and consider them as one of their own.
With the holidays right around the corner and the upcoming departure from your home away from home, take these last few weeks or days and enjoy the time with your chosen family. Because even though some of you may be thinking that you probably will not miss them that much, you may get a shock when you are away from them for a month when you are with them all day, everyday.
Not to mention, how blessed are we to have met people that mean so much to us who make it hard to be away from them for a month?
