Two years ago, I volunteered to drive to a concert in Philadelphia in my mint mini cooper, with one of my best friends. We had our bags packed and our matching concert tees on and I started driving. We cruised up the Merritt Parkway from New Haven, a free way I’ve driven over a thousand times. Then, we crossed into New York and I LOST it. There were so many lanes, too many signs to read and more cars then I believed could fit between the guardrails. I’m not totally sure of what the symptoms of a panic attack are but I am 99.9% sure that I had one on the side of the highway. Needless to say, my friend had to drive the rest of the way and the whole way back. It was after that that I realized I would have trouble ever leaving my home state and have noticed it more and more since.

When I open up my Snapchat every day, I tap through images of my friends smiling and laughing, always with a different geo-tag attached. My people are fresh out of college, and ready to explore what the world has to offer. I know married people, married people that are my age. I know people that have taken positions in states far away from home, with no one there they know. I have friends who are backpacking across Europe, without a care in the world (literally). I crave those adventures and want to see new things, but at the same time, there is something so comforting to me about being right here in Connecticut.

What is comforting is that despite the fact that I grew up in this state, and even went to college here, I find something new to love about it all the time. I am constantly meeting new people, finding new restaurants to obsess over, and new things to do that I didn’t know about.

On the contrary, I have all my routines and favorite spots mapped out all over the state. My favorite coffee shops are mapped out no matter what town I end up in. I know where to get the ice cream that will cheer me up after the worst of days. And most importantly, I always know where to shop. It’s also virtually impossible to get me lost, I can always find my way around.

Definitively, home is the place where all of these things are true, and you have people around you to love. So what is most comforting is that this is home, and even if I ever decide to leave here, I know I will come back.