When we hear the word “break,” we immediately think of vacations, relaxation, beach days, fun, and ultimately, going home. For many college students, Spring Break might’ve been the perfect opportunity to return to their childhood homes, reconnect with their families, and spend some time in their hometowns. We crave familiarity and nostalgia, but there comes a time when going home starts to feel different.
Returning to a place you’ve grown up in your whole life, you’d expect it to be everything you remember, exactly as you remember it. On the outside, it just might be. But when you step into your old room, the one you’ve known for so long, something feels off. There comes a realization that home may not have changed, but you have.
This strange realization happened to me when I returned home for this past Spring Break. The minute I reached my room, I felt that even though everything looked familiar, nothing felt that way. I recognized my wall hangings, my books, the pictures on my shelves, and the mementos I’d kept from high school. But these objects I’d once strategically placed, I couldn’t help but feel like they belonged to someone else.
The hangings on the walls are something I would never have thought of picking out if I saw them in the store for the first time today. The pictures on the shelves contained memories of people I no longer know well. The books lay by my bed collecting dust. The mementos tell the story of the girl who had lived in this room and fit perfectly in it. But standing in it, I felt slightly out of place.
As I wrestled with these feelings, I noticed more that felt different too. Though it seemed like I hadn’t been gone for that long, my younger siblings already seemed like they had grown so much as well. Suddenly, they have new routines, friends, jokes, and lingo I’m unfamiliar with. All around me, small changes had accumulated slowly over time to become something noticeable. Although I know that life goes on at home even when I’m not there, I never truly considered the ramifications of these changes.
That’s when it dawned on me that perhaps it’s possible to outgrow the home you grew up in. Not in the way that there is no longer a place for you there, but perhaps in the sense that it stops feeling like where you belong and more like where you came from.
The thought seems alarming at first, as so many of us have a special place in our hearts for our homes. But outgrowing your home isn’t a loss; it’s a sign of how much you’ve developed as a person. And how everything and everyone around you continues to develop as well.
In knowing this, we can reflect on how far we’ve come and how our homes have shaped us and prepared us for our futures. What once defined us becomes a staple of where we’ve been, how we got to where we are now, and where we’re going.
As Azar Nafisi once wrote, “You get a strange feeling when you’re about to leave a place like you’ll not only miss the people you love, but you’ll miss the person you are now at this time and this place, because you’ll never be this way ever again.”
Nafisi’s words demonstrate the reality of outgrowing where we began and the versions of ourselves that once fit there. But this growth is proof of our ability to build lives of our own, while carrying pieces of the past that have shaped us. And though we may miss the feeling of belonging that home once provided, it’s important to remember that home isn’t just a place—it’s the people. No matter how much we change, we always have a place with the people we love, even as we outgrow the place we started.
So, as you go home for all future breaks to come, rather than focusing on what’s familiar, look at how you’ve grown. You’ll always have your childhood house, memories, and the family that grounds you—but our roles at home and the way we fit into it will continue to change over time. But that isn’t something to fear. Instead, it’s something to appreciate as it’s confirmation that we’re moving forward and embarking toward something new. We may outgrow the places we begin, but we carry them with us in all that we become.