I do my best to stay in touch with my people from home. I was lucky enough to go to high school and have a really close friend group that talks pretty much everyday. This isn’t to flex on anyone that I have good friends from home or anything like that, but they are pretty awesome. Sometimes we talk about school work, what’s going on at our respective colleges, or drama going on in our lives. The other day, one of my friends was getting homesick and brought up something very interesting. She talked about how it was mind-boggling to her that nothing in our lives would ever be the same as it was. After this, pictures from our high school years were sent back and forth and we recalled very specific and special moments that we shared throughout high school. Pictures of us at concerts, prom, homecoming dances, and us getting ready to go out brought back memories of very specific moments – something that made us laugh, cry or any emotion in between.
It is a very interesting concept to think of. My English teacher once explained the process of graduating and leaving what we know behind. She said that teachers spend years molding us, getting to know us, and forming bonds. Then, our senior year comes around and we’re getting ready to go out into the real world as a product of our environment and all the hand-holding they did throughout our formative years. We graduate, move on, and come back, but not necessarily the same as who we were when we left. The teachers have moved on to holding the hands of other kids that need help, and they watch us flourish from afar in our new environments. It is a hard concept to grasp and something that can be sad, exciting and terrifying all at the same time.
It is wild when I think about all of the people in my graduating class that I will most likely see again. As a spring semester Freshman, it still feels weird to go home. I go to the coffee shop and see kids that are a year younger than me, doing exactly what I was doing at this time last year. I pass by my school most days that I’m home, picking up and dropping off my little sister as she begins to form the same friendships I made when I was her age that have, so far, lasted me a lifetime. There was a place that connected us and now it no longer does, which is a scary thought to me and my friends. It is so weird to be in a place that you spend most of your life, but when you come home each time from school, it feels like a slightly different place. There are new people and new things going on that you are quite unsure how to approach. One thing that never changes for me when I go home is how excited I get to see my family and my friends, and how good it feels to all be together again like we were just six months ago. The saying “Change is inevitable. Growth is optional” rings very true in my life when my friends and I get back together after having continued to grow in our own, individual, environments.