Over this past weekend (October Break), I visited my hometown of Buffalo, NY for the first time since coming to Kenyon at the beginning of the semester. I didn’t know what to expect from my first visit home; I’d heard that going back always feels odd, off, uncomfortable, like a shoe that no longer fits. I moved through a large range of emotions in those few days, and at the end of the ups-and-downs, I found myself splitting the experience into five main realizations:
“Home” will never be quite the same as you remember it.
I implicitly expected to fit right back into my old role within my family. I neglected to imagine the ways in which they’d change: people adapt to new situations, like the day-to-day absence of a previously integral family member, by changing their behaviors and the nature of their relationships to each other.
Not long after I left, my mother transformed my bedroom into a place for my grandfather to stay when he visited. Most technically, she bought a new, more gender-neutral comforter for my bed, hung different canvas prints on the wall, and moved the excess stuff I’d left on my desk into my closet to hide it; she maintains that this is not equivalent to kicking me out (though I maintain it kind of is, and she’s now backpedaling to seem more loving in print.) She also brought the old exercise equipment in our basement up into the living room and started a daily workout routine. She finished binging Gilmore Girls, the show we watched together whenever we could because she “didn’t want to wait until I was home again” (thanks, Mom).
My younger brother, normally the slacker of the family (but admittedly the better athlete), started at a new school, my now-old high school. He’s working harder than ever to study for tests and do well in his classes, and seeing him excel in that environment—one that I used to be in—is new. He also has mostly new friends, and ironically many of these friends are younger siblings of some of my best friends. In some ways, it’s like he’s taken over the role I vacated when I came to Kenyon, and while I’m proud of him, I also don’t know where that leaves me now.
But you won’t be the same either.
I felt briefly betrayed that my family had changed since I left, then I realized how hypocritical that was. I too had changed since coming to Kenyon. I had started taking classes in subject fields I had literally zero experience in because I wanted to explore them (I’m looking at you, computer programming). I had joined many clubs that were dissimilar to ones I’d been a part of in high school to pursue new interests (like Her Campus!). I had gone deeper into subject fields and extracurriculars I knew I enjoyed (I’ve never regularly read more literary journal submissions in my life), and I had made many new friends whose life experiences completely differed from my own. I had gotten glasses, stopped straightening my hair, and let my nails grow longer than the bitten stubs they’d been during my senior year (and the dreaded college application process). I had started openly owning identities completely different from the ones I owned in high school and ventured completely outside my comfort zone.
And that’s okay!
I am actively happier here at Kenyon than I was at almost any other point in my young adult life. I may be drastically changing from the self I was in Buffalo, but college is a time for growth and uncertainty. I would much rather explore new interests and develop new perspectives now (and continue doing so throughout my life) than stagnate for fear of change or abandonment.
At a college interview last winter, I was asked by the alumna I was paired with, “How do you want college to change you?” She explained her philosophy: if a person comes out of college intact in the same way they entered it, they didn’t learn anything new from their education or grow at all in what they could offer society. What would be the point of that? I don’t think my answer to the question satisfied her: I said I purposefully didn’t want to imagine or know how college would change me, for if I could anticipate and willfully shape it, how much would my perspectives really be changing? (I ultimately didn’t get into this school.)
But, I think of that anecdote whenever I’m asked why I chose to attend college or why I chose to attend Kenyon specifically. I came here to become someone else, someone new, someone better—to take the self I was before and more fully develop her. If I can look back to my pre–Kenyon self in the future, even at the end of freshman year, and see no differences between her and my current self, then I’m not doing what I set out to do here.
The place you come from will still be your home.
I made the drive to pick my brother up from my old high school by memory, astonished by how many fixtures of Sheridan Drive I could remember: the Paula’s Donuts right before the road hits Belmont, the construction perpetually happening near Harlem, the Jim’s Steakout that signals I need to make the next turn left onto Colvin. Tim Horton’s—or Timmy Ho’s, its more common slang name in Buffalo—tea still tastes infinitely better than anything I’ve had to drink at Kenyon, and even though Peirce does breakfasts quite well, I miss the familiarity of Smile Cookie sales, Camp Day fundraisers, Roll Up The Rim, and the list of the words, “One plain bagel, toasted, half butter, please.”
Always please, always polite. Buffalo has a culture of kindness based in shared suffering, and falling back into patterns of county-wide inside jokes was all too easy. We jest about the complete inhabitability of the city and all its suburbs from early November to late March, when the snow hits and keeps hitting; we wear shirts that say “my city smells like Cheerios” from the sheer soaking of downtown with multigrain odor from the local General Mills factories; we unabashedly love our sucky football and hockey teams and truthfully don’t know what we’d do if they started winning more than they lost (feeling like posers); and I miss all this. Despite everything, Buffalo is still my home, and every so often, I want more than anything else to sit in my high school’s theater, Sabres blanket wrapped around my shoulders, and sleep in the way dim winters demand.
But, when you come back onto campus at the end of break, Kenyon will feel like home, too.
I might miss my Buffalonian roots while in Gambier, but I also found myself missing Gambier while in Buffalo. I wanted desserts equivalent to those served in Peirce and evenings spent in the Norton lounge watching The Great British Baking Show. I wanted to finish my readings, not in my childhood kitchen but in the section of Olin with leather couches that look on the Kenyon Authors bookshelf, imagining that one day I could find my name in those spines. I wanted to walk down Middle Path listening to soft music and to know, just know, that if I am certain about anything, it is that I am exactly where I need and want to be amidst all this uncertainty; that the openness and freedom of Kenyon, and the genuine willingness of the people I’ve met here to listen to and support others, already feels like acceptance and belonging.Ultimately, I think visiting home proved to be good for me. I spent time with my family, visited friends and teachers who’d significantly influenced me in my pre-Kenyon life, and remembered all the wonderful eccentricities I love about Buffalo. But, I also came back to Kenyon with a stronger appreciation of my life here.
“Was it like the shoe no longer fit?” my friend at another school asked me when she heard I’d gone home. “Not quite,” I said back. “Buffalo still feels like home. It’s just that I’m now only wearing one shoe from there. The other foot’s in Ohio.”
Image Credit: Courtney Felle