Coming Home

WRITTEN BY SOPHIE GLAD ILLUSTRATED BY IZZY CHEW DESIGNER EMILY CADENA

The feeling of being home: it’s a different feeling for everyone and it’s a different place for each person. Some don’t have a happy family life, so the feeling of home comes from somewhere outside of that. For some, it is exactly that place where they came from. What remains the same is that we all know that feeling, the feeling of being home, wherever that may be – that warm, comfortable and familiar feeling.

Last year, I spent my first year of college on the opposite side of the country from where I grew up. Moving from Portland, Oregon, to upstate New York is no small change. It was an experience, for sure, and a big learning one (as I am sure all of our college experiences have been). The whole school year, I was trying to find a way to make this new place feel like a space that could one day feel like a “home” of sorts, somewhere that felt more like a landing ground than the temporary state I found it to feel like. It never came. I felt like I was just waiting to come back to my real home the whole time I was there; I was just waiting to come back to Oregon. So, when I eventually did, I decided to stay and transfer from somewhere that felt so unnecessarily far away to somewhere a bit closer to home: the University of Oregon.

I was so excited upon making this new decision because this felt right. It felt like there would be no way to fail if I was closer to things that were familiar and more me, right? I didn’t anticipate that sometimes when you come home, it doesn’t really feel like home anymore. At least, not in the ways it once did. I think that’s something many of us can relate to; after leaving for college, your hometown will simply never be the same as it was during, say, high school. The people that made it the way it once was are often gone, new buildings are built and others are shut down, streets change and the tone inevitably shifts over time. It’s familiar, it’s technically home, but it’s not quite the same. This realization became apparent to me a month or two into the pandemic; I realized that the itch to come home changed again into the itch to leave again. I guess the grass is always greener, right?

And so a change happened: I drove the one hour and forty minutes that it takes to get from Portland to Eugene. And that felt good. That felt right. I was able to leave home, and yet still be somewhere I assumed I would be able to fit into, unlike my last attempt. Or so I thought. I’ve found that a nagging sense of being “behind” has followed me throughout this first year here. I am somewhere that I feel like I should be fitting into, and yet, the sense of loneliness that was incredibly present last year remains lingering. Oh, the life of a transfer student. Of course, being in the middle of a pandemic hasn’t done me any favors in that realm. So here I am, in the middle of spring term of my sophomore year of college, and I don’t feel as though I have come too much further than where I started out as a freshman. I’m sure that with the state of the world lately, I am not the only one that feels this way – so I think it’s important to realize that while this may feel like the case for many of us, it might not necessarily be so. Whether we feel like we’ve accomplished much, or nothing at all, we are still moving forward through time no matter what, and I’m sure you have done something during this time.

So do I feel like I’m “home,” or that I even know where that feeling exists for me currently? No. But that’s okay. From moving around, I have realized what things I really do want, and what things I don’t need; I have made my goals clearer and have figured out what is working best for me. I think that right now is a point in our lives where we aren’t supposed to feel comfortable. We are supposed to try everything out. Without doing so, it would be impossible to see what we really want with any clarity. So, if you’re able to, I urge you to be uncomfortable for a while – as unpleasant as it may be. I think that even though I’m still in the middle of whatever this journey is shaping up to be, it’s teaching me a lot – and that is one of the most valuable things in any experience. Go home, or don’t. Home, or whatever comfort you are looking for, is where you make it.