Coming home for the holidays is meant to be a joyous, warm and even nostalgic occasion. You can pretty much smell when the holiday season is in the air. Holidays, however, can also bring about some negative emotions, including anxiety. College students are not an exception to this emotion, but rather the majority. Here are some reasons you, as a college student, may be feeling anxious when going home for Thanksgiving:
- going back to a place you might’ve outgrown already
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Growth is one of those things that you don’t really notice while it’s happening. Then, one day, you decide to look back on your life and realize you are nowhere near the same place you were in before.
It’s hard to see at first. You move into college and wonder if you’ll ever truly adjust. Will this ever feel normal? All of a sudden, you are pretty much on your own: stranded. After a couple of months, though, you start to get used to the feeling of not being home. It happens gradually, then all at once. You get used to not having to tell anyone where you’re going. You get used to not having to ask for permission for everything. You get used to living on your own terms. The homesickness occurs less and less, and you catch yourself getting used to the feeling of finally being independent.
It feels good, right? Like a breath of fresh air, almost. And now comes the holidays. Just when you have started to get used to your new “normal,” you have to go back to the place that was once your “normal.” Oftentimes, you can find yourself feeling anxious at the thought of going back to a place that you feel like you have outgrown. It’s like squeezing yourself back into a mold that just isn’t your shape anymore. For students who don’t have the healthiest relationship with their family, it can be an even more jarring feat; you now have to return back to a place that brought you so much pain, after finally being able to get a taste of what it’s like to find peace on your own.
- Your hometown friends start to feel like strangers
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This is often a trigger that people overlook until they are looking at it dead in the eyes. The people you grew up with, who you once knew everything about and who once knew everything about you, suddenly feel like strangers. You live different lives in different places and have different friends.
A few months may not feel like a long time, but a lot can change. You could be standing across from someone you once knew everything about, and all of a sudden not know anything about their current life at all. Maybe their favorite color changed. Maybe the way they talk changed. Maybe their whole personality is different because of who they have been surrounded with. All of these are normal and even expected things to happen to students when they go to college, but it doesn’t make it any easier to experience firsthand with someone you once were very close to.
- the pain of having to say goodbye again
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The first goodbye when your parents or family is dropping you off for college can be hard enough as it is. Even saying goodbye to your hometown and your old bedroom is a process of its own. Similar to the outgrowing, after a few months have passed, you may have started to get accustomed to your new life on campus. The pain of the initial goodbye starts to become a distant memory.
Coming home for the holidays is something to look forward to, but sometimes the thought of having to say goodbye all over again can be a hard pill to swallow. You were just starting to let time heal this ache of leaving your hometown and family, and you are just expected to be able to revisit this place with no strings attached. It’s not easy to open a wound like this back up.
Emotions are hard to predict, control and even acknowledge. Anxiety, specifically, is a deep-rooted and multifaceted emotion, making this process sometimes even harder to identify. Don’t beat yourself up during the holiday season! Yes, it is a beautiful and joyous time of year and allows you to reconnect with your roots, but it is also a time of year that forces you to look at your growth and your past dead in the eyes. The first step is always accepting and the sooner you come to terms with the emotions you are feeling, the sooner you can be kinder to yourself for feeling them.