Coming back to school after winter break is an experience that college students seem to universally agree is slightly disorienting, if not downright jarring. For me, spending a month at home involved a routine that was fundamentally different than what I do at school most days. The ability to sleep in as much as I wanted, the absence of work, and the prospect of having a kitchen right downstairs rather than having to trek across campus to the dining hall were all aspects of living at home that I now feel I sorely undervalued.
Being at home at 10 am on Sunday morning, and then at school by 4 pm the same day, highlighted the feeling of disorientation that only modern travel patterns can create. In the days following the start of the second semester, it felt at times both like I had been gone for months, and like I had never left at all. Of course, being a first-year, the fact that I had never experienced this sudden shift from home-to-school near 500 miles away, only heightened my feelings of displacement and disorientation. It felt as though I was slightly out of place; as though everyone else was settling back in right away and I still didn’t quite know what I was doing. My friends were almost overly enthusiastic to be back; as they talked about how excited they were, I could only smile and nod and feel a tendril of homesickness curl in the pit of my stomach.
As the days passed, though, I realized that more people were feeling out of place than I thought. Even if people talked about how they were excited for classes to start and how they couldn’t wait to be waking up at 7:30 in the morning again, more people felt a little out of place or a little homesick than they wanted to admit. That realization was one of the first things that made me feel a little better about not quite feeling ready to be back yet. The second realization I had was that maybe things felt a little off for a reason.
I guess I was expecting to fall back into the same routine I had before winter break– watching Netflix for way too many hours a day, leaving five-page papers to the day before they were due. I started thinking after a few days, though, that maybe I felt like everything was changing because it was changing. And I could change a little, too. The saying “new year, new me” is cliched, for sure. It does seem to hold a ring of truth, though, when I think about the small changes people make every year to create a life that’s just a little different than the one they had before.
So yes, everything feels a little off coming back to school from a month-long break. I began to realize, though, that maybe that wasn’t a bad thing. The feelings of displacement and unease that I felt were really just leaving room for me to grow a little, to change a few things about my life that I hadn’t done last semester. I couldn’t fall back into the same routine I’d had before winter break, but it turned out that that was alright. I didn’t really want to. The more that I thought about it, the more I realized that I wanted to change.
I started actually going to the gym– something I had been meaning to do since the beginning of the year but never really got around to. I started eating dinner a little later, and getting my work done a little earlier, and checking my mailbox every day, and enjoying sunny days when they came around once in a while. It’s true, everything did feel different when I came back to school after a month at home. But why not take advantage of that? New year, new me, right?
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