For me, the hardest part of college is not the classes. It’s not moving houses. It’s not making new friends. For me, the most challenging part of college is that I feel homeless. Not in the conventional sense, where I live in a cardboard box on the street, but in the sense that nowhere truly feels like home. You know that feeling of ‘home,’ it’s feeling of belonging, of certainty, of acceptance, of comfort.
Coming to Cheney, I was leaving the home I had grown up. I had never moved until my parents divorced, but even then, my dad kept my birth home. I grew up in that town. I had made countless memories in that cul-de-sac, but come senior year of high school, I was more than ready for a change in scenery.
Or so I thought.
I remember hauling essentially all of my belongings up to the ninth floor of Dressler Hall, embarrassed when my mom wanted to stick around and help me unpack. After she had finished, shed sufficient tears, and given too many hugs to remember, she got back into her car and drove off, leaving me standing by the back door of my new home for the next nine months. For the first part of dorm life, I was too excited to feel sad. There were so many people to meet, so many events to attend, so much to do! However, once the excitement of being independent and living without my mom faded, I quickly realized something; no matter how many memories I made in this new place I called ‘home’, it would never really fill the hole in my heart entirely.
Don’t get me wrong, I love Cheney. I recently moved in to my next ‘home’ in Cheney for the next nine months with my roommate and have made some lifelong memories, but this small town will never quite feel like home. It is missing that sense of long-built comfort. There’s a certain level of sentimentality that this place lacks and will never truly have.
On the other side of the coin it is my hometown. Like many other college students, almost immediately after my departure, my room was transformed. And when I say transformed, I mean completely altered. All of my extra ‘stuff’ I had left at home was put in boxes, labeled, and taken to the dark and endless storage pit downstairs. Every piece of furniture was either sold or refurbished. Any wall decorations were taken down and the walls were painted a neutral tan. All new furniture was brought in and organized so that it would no longer be remotely recognizable as ‘my room.' I became me in this house, experienced all that life had to offer up until that point. And now, it has rapidly evolved, and all of the interior has been changed and upgraded. Now, when I go ‘home’ for break, I no longer have a bedroom. I feel like a guest in my ‘home.'
My hometown carries with it a feeling of nostalgia, of reliving memories from the past. The difference lies in that here, at college, I can see a future, not a past.
It is difficult to see your old ‘home’ as just a house, just the place you once lived, the place you grew up but not the place you feel at home. It is just as difficult to look at your current house and realize it lacks the past and the memories. You didn’t build yourself here. You didn’t grow up here. To me, neither place truly feels like home, neither feels like I truly belong, neither carries the feeling of comfort that I crave. Until I find that elusive feeling of ‘home,’ I will be feeling homesick for places that I have never been.
