So you have successfully completed your first few months of college. You have started to finally feel settled in to college life. You are becoming more comfortable with your courses, (hopefully) learning how to manage your time better and are starting to form substantial friendships on campus. Then your first break hits, and you go back home for the first time since August. After you finally reunite with your family and set down your suitcase, you realize how much some things haves changed, how much some things will never change, and have a whole new appreciation for previously ordinary things. Here are the 10 things that happen when you return home from college for the first time.
1. You run to and greet your pets with about the same amount of enthusiasm that Allie and Noah ran to each in The Notebook. You seriously wonder whether you’ve missed your pets more than you’ve missed your family.
2. You run to your bedroom and throw yourself onto your bed. It feels amazing to finally lie down in your own bed. After spending weeks of living in a crowded dorm, you feel incredibly relaxed to finally lie in your own bed, in your own space.
3. You can’t stop thinking about all of the showers you are going to take without shower shoes over the course of your visit back home. Because no matter how many months you spend at college, you will never fully adjust to the tragedy of the communal bathroom life.
Yes! Civilized living conditions!
4. You remember YikYak, and immediately open up the app to see what people are talking about in your hometown. You quickly realize that all of the yaks are from your local community college, and that they are not up to par with the “quality” yaks back on your campus. The yaks are so bad that you suddenly start to miss being at your university.
5. You then remember about Tinder, and cannot shake your curiosity of “Who that I graduated with is now on Tinder?” Of course, you immediately open up the app to find out. You quickly swipe left anytime you come across somebody from your high school, silently judging them in your head, ignoring the fact that you too are on Tinder.
6. When you get into your car to drive for the first time since the summer, you worry that maybe you’ve forgotten how to drive. You start imaging the worst: you’ll pull out of your driveway onto the road, but it’s been so long since you’ve driven that you will completely forget how to and won’t be able to control the car, so you swerve into traffic and cause a nine-car-pile-up-accident. But once you start driving, you feel as if you never stopped driving in the first place.
7. You then decide to turn on the radio to see if they are still playing the same 10 songs that they were playing over the summer. After repeatedly hearing “Fancy”, “Problem” and “Counting Stars” (they’ve been playing that song non-stop since last fall), you realize that the usual radio playlist has indeed stayed the same, with the addition of “All About that Bass”, “Shake It Off”, and the “lovely” “Anaconda”. Yep, not much new here.
7. You have a strong desire to get food from every place that you can’t get to while at college. Your stomach is happy. Your wallet isn’t.
8. You decide to go back and visit your old job, and realize that you actually kind of miss the place. You suddenly don’t dread working there over winter break as much as you did. A piece of you is actually looking forward to it.
9. You reach out to all of your friends from high school to see who else in in town. Somewhere along the way, you start to question whether or not you actually want to see all of these people.
10. You realize that nothing has really changed back home, and that you are anxious to go back to college. A piece of you will still miss the familiarity and comfort of your hometown, but the rest of you knows that there are bigger and brighter things ahead of you.
When you finally return back to college, you also get that feeling of “returning home”. And when somebody posts on your high school college decisions Facebook group “haha remember high school,” you laugh to yourself and are so happy that those days are in the past.