The first time I went home from college to visit my parents, I could smell my house. You might be thinking, well duh, great acknowledgement of your senses, but for 18 years I had never been aware of the scent. It was the scent blindness that came with the comfortable familiarity of a place. A familiarity that had been lost in the span of four weeks.
I remember my brain went on autopilot, picking up everything that had changed. I noticed everything from the hole in the yard where a tree had fallen down to the shift in the items on the counters. I would have that urge to walk across the hall to talk to my siblings, only to realize that the hall I yearned to cross went from being a step to a car ride away. There had never been a need to text them because by coexisting with them, I always had one foot in their lives.
At first, it was a conflict between my apparent homesickness and the part of me learning to establish myself in a new ecosystem surrounded by an entire new cast of characters. I fell into a limbo, feeling more at home in my parents house than where I was living in Richmond, but chafing against my hometown. One had familiarity, and the other let me figure out who I was without the pressure of the previously established versions of myself.
What it took me a while to realize was that every piece of this new puzzle does have a place, it’s just involved readjusting my perspective to see where they go. Learning everything from how to feel at home in a new setting to reforming some of my people-pleasing habits to set boundaries. Meeting the abundance of new people all trying to do the same thing meant relearning to what extent I can allow the people I care about to lean on me without sending myself crumbling.
I learn so much from the friends I’ve made here, people who have impacted my life so much in just a few short years that it’s impossible to imagine how I ever existed without them. They’ve taught me so much about the quality of friendships that it’s possible to have. The power of being able to have mature confrontation when boundaries are crossed without the walls crashing down, and being able to recognize my own shortcomings as a friend. Being able to have people who understand what you’re going through even if it’s as simple as “I miss my dog” is essential. They are what helped me settle into the idea that “home” is a concept that isn’t a structure, and can contain multitudes.
The thing about all of this growing is that, at this point in my college career, it’s hard to see where I’m even growing toward — if I’m growing toward the sunlight or accidentally getting blocked by a fence. There are days where it feels like someone has planted a larger tree in front of my garden and blocked the sun so completely that I’m spending more effort going diagonal to find a new patch in the sun.
The reality is that these pains and shifts are inevitable. Everyone I know is encountering them in some way, even if theirs is more of a bug gnawing on their branches or being uprooted completely. Some days it’s longing for the old garden, for a time where I couldn’t smell my house or when the changes at home didn’t seem so jarring because I was there to watch them build. But I do think that there’s a comfort in being able to have people and places so meaningful that it hurts to miss them when I’m away. It’s the same comfort of knowing I can call my friends and know that they understand what I’m feeling because at least some molecule of them is going through something similar.
There is no one-size-fits-all solution to any of this, and I feel like a new rock is being thrown into my garden at least once a week at this point. My dad told me before I left for college that I would experience and learn more in four years than the eighteen years prior, and I think about that everyday.
I’ve learned so much about myself in these three years, and while a lot of these realizations have been tough, all of them have been necessary. Growing pains are just that, painful. But they mean that we are not stagnant, and that, despite everything, we are changing for the better.