It’s the night before I leave my hometown to go back to the place I now call home. My home away from home that I love dearly, the greatest city of all, yet intertwined with this deep appreciation and love for this place is a burden: school. Living on your school’s campus is such an interesting feeling. I’m grateful that I don’t dislike my school or have many issues with it at all, but at the end of the day, it is still a school. Living here makes it hard to keep my academic and professional life separate from my life at home and hard to maintain the peace in a space that’s supposed to be my safe place. I mean, I literally live in the same building as 2 of my leads/bosses at work. But these aren’t complaints, rather just the context of what I am returning to.
My friends are here in my bedroom, as we spent the last few hours catching up for the first time in months, just to say goodbye all over again. My last meal there was shared with them, a homecooked meal from my mother, who I would also be leaving the next morning. Not that there’s much that I leave behind every time I go back to New York, but always being the one leaving and not being left makes me feel like I can’t even be upset when I feel lonely or miss home because no one is putting me in this position but myself. No one is ever forcing me to do anything but myself, so who am I to complain? Why do I feel stressed and nervous when I’m surrounded by my friends? I should feel great right now, being smothered with love and company but this pit in my stomach of doom and despair is taunting me from the back of my head reminding me that in one day an impending dread of the semester will begin. That I may be happy now, but it’ll shortly wear off. After all of these conversations we’ve had the past few hours, these feelings are hitting me as my friends and I are laying on my bedroom floor together, looking up at all the momentos in the room that I leave behind at least 4 times a year. Momentos of who I once was, the person I am not when I am back at college. A time capsule of my past self. It’s ironic how I sit here as my friends sing Lizzy McAlpine’s “Pushing It Down and Praying”, the one constant thing I’ve done as I’ve grown over the past few years. The same girl who put up those posters in my room during quarantine before I even began high school coped the same way the girl who leaves everything she once knew behind for a completely different life every year. It really hits you when these friends who are all in different stages in life just like you are singing the piercing lyrics, “I wanna feel guilty, I wanna feel that it’s wrong, I wanna know peace again” as this exact thought lingers in your head everytime you doubt if you made the right decision moving away. Every time you wonder what life would be like now had you not made such a big change in your life. Doubts that will always arise, doubts that I repetitively have to Push Down and Pray over. Doubts that I can’t blame anyone else for but myself.
Like I said: no one is ever forcing myself into situations other than myself. I love a busy and occupied life and dislike free time, but then always bear the consequence of always being exhausted, burnt out, overwhelmed and stressed. 6 classes, 2 e-boards and clubs, and a job (soon to be two). Student loan payments, savings for study abroad, responsibilities. Everything that I would return to the next day. Everything that I put out for myself, that I wanted, yet that I’m simultaneously worrying about. Will I be able to have a social life? Will I be able to handle everything effectively and sufficiently? Will I be happy? These thoughts circle my mind the whole way there. Everytime anyone asked how I felt towards going back my response would be the same, stressed. After explaining why, it was the same comforting reassurance that everything would be okay. And although deep down I know it will, I have a hard time taking my loved ones advice. It’s hard. I’m not even stressing over anything that has already happened, but rather the possibility that something will. And it eats away at me because I’m preparing for a possibility, something that may never come to fruition.
The stress doesn’t go away, but I still go anyway. I still leave, like I always do, and I’ll pretend these worries aren’t consuming my every thought. It’s okay, I’m okay I repeat to myself. The battle over worrying about the unknown will always be around. But it’s not a battle I will fight today, tomorrow or in the near future. I say I don’t like free time, but I think I just don’t like having the time to overthink and worry about things that haven’t happened or are out of my control. So I return home and return to the routine and life that I know here. The life that I worried about throughout my month-long break away. The life I am grateful for and the life that will turn out to be alright.