Leaving for college at the start of your freshman year is strange. It starts out just like a vacation or sleep away camp. You stay in the dorms, you start to meet people and make friends. As the weeks go by, you start to become more comfortable in your new location. The days turn into weeks and then months. You start to find your path and your place at college and in the world. Exploring your new life, finding restaurants and places to shop. But no matter how much you love it there, it's not home yet.
College is the place you go to class, study and make stories. You have friends you can turn to, but not your full support team. The people who are there for you no matter what are back where you came from. A few weeks ago, someone asked me where home was, I told them some cliché about how home consists of people, as opposed to a place. To be fair, I wasn't really that far off. The people at college are amazing. They are brilliant, creative, funny young adults, but they are not the same as your family. When we are at college we joke around about our college family, and although we care a lot about each other, it's not the same. My family is still my people and my house is still my home.
Going by the typical college calendar, students spend more time in the dorms at college then at home. But when I do get out for a break or a weekend, I say I'm going home. Home is not where I spend the most time, but rather for me home is still where my family is. Home is where the space is my own. Where I can relax and shower without shoes, do laundry for free and eat real food. It is where I feel the most comfortable.
Someday that's going to change. Slowly I will start spending more time at college. I will start to look more to the people I go to college to for support than my family. Instead of going home for the summer I will have an apartment, an internship, a life that calls for me to spend more and more time away from home until home isn’t home anymore.
For the majority of college freshmen, the dorms are not home yet. Our dorms are in that weird place between a hotel room and an apartment. For now the concept of home is fuzzy. We don’t quite belong anywhere. When we are at school we know it's not home, but when we are at home we realize that we don’t quite belong there anymore either. It’s a strange feeling and a weird place to be. Mostly it just makes us feel lost unsure of where we belong. That’s one of the hardest parts of going to college. As we settle down in our new environment, our old home is fading faster than our new one is developing. As freshmen we are just the starting to redefine where home is.
