This is my account of a milestone that many college freshmen face: staying the night in your old room at your parents' house for the first time since you moved out.

I moved out over the summer. I didn't think I would miss home, and at first- I didn't. I was living with some really awesome girls from my church for the whole summer, and I would get to live with them during the school year as well. I was constantly surrounded by people I loved. It was a new feeling, considering the last few months that I lived in my parents' house, I practically lived alone in my room (not that I'm proud of that, cause I'm not). But the homesickness caught up with me one night as I was folding my laundry on the floor of the upstairs hangout room in my new house. I started sobbing about how the one thing I prided myself on in high school was the fact that I did my own laundry. And sitting on the floor of a house that wasn't my childhood home, all I wanted was for my parents to help me fold my laundry. (But truly, I think I really just wanted my parents).

And homesickness is a whole different story. It's weird, how it catches up with you at random times for those first few months. My new home on campus is only 25 minutes away from my parents' house, so I would try to combat the homesickness by going home to my parents every week or so. However, I would only spend a few hours, and I would return to campus soon after. I have not spent the night at my parent's house since I moved out, until now.

As I packed my backpack full of the stuff I would need for a night at my parents' house, I felt strange. Just a few months ago, I was packing the same backpack full of the same clothing, but I was coming from my parents' house to the house I now call home. Everything was reversed a few months ago, and it just felt weird to call the house that I was moving into "home". But it is my home, and I feel like it is my home now, yet my parents' house is just as much my home.

Yet as I sit alone in the room that I grew up in, all I want is to go home. Back to my house, the one that I go home to at the end of every day. I feel homesick, and I feel anxious about being in this room that no longer feels like mine. My memories are all here. I can look to my right and see photo strips from my junior prom, a "to-do" list I wrote in the sixth grade, and a ribbon from one of my best friends' funeral. This room holds my most joyful and my most painful memories.

But I do not want those memories to come flooding back. I do not want to remember crying for hours on this bed the night that I found out that one of my best friends died. I do not want to remember laughing and smiling so brightly in this room when I video chatted with my favorite Danish exchange student for the first time since she left. I don't want to remember sitting on the floor (because my bed was too messy) crying over boys and eating ice cream with my best friend. I don't want these memories to come flooding back at once, full of so much pain and joy all at the same time.

There is truth in the words "College changes you". Although college itself did not change me, moving out of my parents' house did. I am a different person, but my genesis lies here, in this very room. This room is where I spent years 1.5 through 18 of my life. And being here just reminds me of every way that I have changed, and it is painful to remember the person I was just a few short months ago.

I feel like a new person now that I am living on my own and paying for my own daily life. However, if there is one thing that coming home has reminded me, it is this: No matter how much you change, your memories from living with your parents will always be there. And to the college kid who dreads going home for the first time: if you have the chance to go back to your childhood bedroom, it might be helpful to do so. Going back has reminded me of who I was, and how those memories have shaped me in positive and negative ways. It has grounded me and helped me to move forward with my life as an adult. I will never be able to go back to those times, but I will be able to move forward and create new memories.

Old memories can swallow you whole in sorrow remembrance, but they will spit you back out with a new chance to move forward from the pain that they have caused.