Home 2.0

Two nights ago, I came home from being with friends feeling strangely uneasy and inexplicably sad. I was talking to my mom on my bed, sort of throwing my hands a bit more than metaphorically into the air and exclaiming that I didn't know what was wrong with me. She calmly looked at me and explained that often, the letdown is greater than the excitement, and sometimes there isn't anything left to do at night except sit on your bed and cry with your mom. I imagine this is very true during many monumental changes throughout young adult and adult life. Sometimes, you have a bed and a mom to cry with. Other times, you might just have a bed.

Growing up, as of this very moment, has a lot of stock in my constantly changing and shifting definition of the word Home.

Home, n

A house, apartment, or other shelter that is the usual residence of a person, family, or household.

By definition, it's not a very difficult concept to understand. By meaning, or by feeling, however, it takes many forms. This is what they don't warn you about. When you go off to college, counselors like to remind you to budget your time, to leave the door to your dorm room open during the first week, to not neglect your studies, and that you will pull some all-nighters.

Counselors don't tell you that your understanding of your home is going to flip upside-down.

No one warned me that I might be given an education, new friends, new experiences, as well as a second sort of home, a second place of refuge, a second place to store all of my stuff. When I was home for Thanksgiving break, this scared and confused me. Now that I'm home again for a whole month, I've realized that my double-life, my two-home situation, is actually kind of awesome. 

There are moments of confusion, sure. There are moments when I'm worried about the fact that my two lives may never overlap in the ways I might like them to, or that some days I might long for one life over the other. That being said, they aren't really separate lives, are they? They're just branches of the same life I've always had. They just stretch in different directions and can be a burden to bend.

I've never regarded myself as the type of person who really enjoys significant change. I like routine and I love familiarity -- college pushed me out of pretty much every comfort zone I've ever been a part of, and it was probably the best thing to ever happen to me, to my surprise. Change is scary, but that doesn't make it bad, or something I should avoid. A lot of the time, change is how we end up learning exactly who we are, and exactly how much we can handle. 

Bit of advice: we can handle a hell of a lot more than we think we can.

I finished a book this week called The Lover's Dictionary by David Levithan. The book is about love, of course, but with love comes change. Of all the definitions he writes throughout the book, this seemed to me the most relevant right now:

Flux, n

The natural state. Our moods change. Our lives change. Our feelings for each other change. Our bearings change. The song changes. The air changes. The temperature of the shower changes. 

Accept this. We must accept this.

Change happens in small increments and then it hits in huge bursts of uncontrollable anxieties. And we accept it, even when it's hard. There have been days of break where I've woken up content with this fact, and days where it has frightened me all day. I didn't think there was a word for weeks like these.

Flux.

-Hannah