I don’t know the exact moment I realized it; maybe it was when I realized I hadn’t been back to my hometown in over a month and there was no twinge of homesickness. Maybe it was when I realized that when I did go back and visit my hometown, I missed my college town and couldn’t wait to be back. It could’ve been when I realized that coming home for the summer wasn’t what I was most excited for anymore—it was going back in the fall to friendly faces and a familiar schedule. I don’t know the exact moment I realized it, but one day it hit me that that where I grew up is no longer what I associate with as my home.

It took me awhile to figure this out, and it took me even longer to be okay with it. After all, it seemed a little heartless to take all of the memories I have of the place I grew up, not to mention the friends and family that live there, and toss them aside for a town I’ve lived in for less than a year, right? Well, look at it this way.

Take all of the crazy stuff that goes on in the first 18 years of your life: your highest highs, your lowest lows, and all of that other insane, confusing stuff everyone has to deal with, and shove all of that into a nine-month period of time, AKA your first year of school away from home. You basically experience all of the same emotions in a much shorter time frame with the added bonus of not having to go through puberty again (PTL).

Take this concept and apply it to your friends, too. I feel just as close to some of the friends I made a year ago as I do to some of my best friends that I’ve grown up with. Just like my hometown friends and I went through whatever life threw at us together, so did me and my college friends, too. Go through enough together, and some of those friends start to feel like family.

I realized I wasn’t “tossing aside” my hometown for my college town; my hometown holds such a special place in my heart, and it always will (even though it’s super boring, but that’s beside the point). And I wasn’t replacing old friends with new ones, either. I think my college town became just as significant to me as my hometown was, if not more significant. Somewhere in between the late night study sessions, the much-needed ice creams runs, and the crazy nights with even crazier stories, the torch was passed. I was forced to grow up (a lot), like most of us are, and through the crazy hot mess that is freshman year, I came out on the other side feeling a lot of love for the place I went through all of that at.

I came out on the other side with a new place to call home.