You never realize just how much you will miss home until you actually move out of it.

Cliché I know.

But personally, there is something so tragic about standing in the bedroom you spent your whole life in, up until now, to realize it’s no longer yours.

Sure, it’s still ‘your’ room when you go back for winter and summer break. But it’s no longer the room you study all night in, it’s no longer the room you do your makeup in, it’s no longer the room you laugh for hours with your friends in.

It’s a room filled with past memories, filled with your past life. It’s almost as if reality is altered in that room. Your elementary, middle and high school friends exist in that room but not the ones from college. AP American History, geometry, and French class exist there, but not International Journalism, Journalism Ethics, or Strategic Communications.

All of your past struggles and obstacles, what you thought made you into who you were exist here. But you’ve become a different person from then, not new, just different.

It’s almost surreal how the obstacles you face in your new life seem to shrink, almost disappear when you are in your childhood room. They seem to not matter as much as you thought they did.

See, what I think is that spending time in your childhood room once you’ve left it puts all of your new life experiences into perspective. It’s one of the few places your past meets your future because for so long you sat in that room imagining what your future would be like but now it’s here and you reflect on your younger self.

For so long you sat in the room dreaming of growing up and leaving, but now you’re growing up and you sit there and wish you could go back.

You sit there, angry with yourself for taking it all for granted as a kid.

The summer mornings looking out the window to everything perfectly blue and green and your dad is mowing the lawn. The winter nights looking out the window where air stood still and snowflakes gently fell from the sky.

The room where you played with all your stuffed animals and you slept nestled with every one of them too. The room you danced insanely to Avril Lavigne in. The room you went through your tomboy, girly and angsty phases in.

But as you stand in that room now those are no longer your reality but your memories.

That room grew up along with you while kindly holding on to bits of your past. Sure the paint color changed a few times but there are still art projects and yearbooks from elementary school in the drawers. Books you read in middle school on the shelves and pictures you took in high school hanging up on the wall.

And suddenly the moment you stop growing up with that room, the moment you move away and continue to grow somewhere else, that room stops growing with you.

The first time you return back you don’t feel the difference between you two. The second, third and fourth time you begin to see changes in yourself, it feels a little different being back. And somewhere are about three years it will hit you in the face like a brick wall and you will see the difference in the person you were and the person you are in that room.

Not that one is better than the other but that the changes in your life since you stopped living there have made you grow.

And as I sat on the floor of my room, listening to the way the rain hit my window the way it did for the past 21 years this became the hardest pill to swallow. I was finally starting to be where I always imagined I would be growing up. But that meant my childhood was finally behind me and there was no going back.

Never did I think I was going to miss being home so much.