Last week, I left my new home in San Jose to fly home to Lehigh to visit my college friends for the weekend. Then, my family picked me up, and we drove five hours to my childhood home in Pittsburgh. In just one week, I’ve existed in three different homes, each with people that either are or have become family. As the week comes to a close, I’ve reflected on the feeling of home and wondered if this is what it will feel like forever: Something that I’m constantly living, visiting, and missing all at once.
As a child, home felt like walking home from school with neighbors for after-school snacks. It felt like staying up late tracking Santa and leaving cookies out alongside the reindeer food my siblings and I had made earlier that day. Home was my entire extended family gathering for the holidays like we always did, with no question as to how we’d get there or who wouldn’t make it that year. When I put it that way, there's no question as to why now, home feels like nostalgia.
As I enter the first fully independent chapter of my life, I know that I will have to redefine what home means to me. I will have to build that for myself and likely experience many moments that don’t feel like home in order to find it again.
Being back in Pittsburgh still brings me great comfort, and for that, I am lucky. But I’ve learned that some parts of myself have found homes in other places. For example, my nostalgia lives in Pittsburgh, while my love for new experiences and people has made itself at home in San Jose.
In this new chapter, home feels like a piece of me introducing itself, one that I didn’t even know was there before: It is far from comfortable or homey to weather the storm of old and new parts of myself meeting face-to-face.
The other night, after a week of soaking in nostalgia, I woke up in a panic. The overwhelming weight of change felt unbearable as I processed the fact that I will feel more and more like a visitor in my own house each year. I convinced myself that I had to say goodbye to any sense of home if I truly wanted to grow up.
The morning after the panicked wakeup call from within, I took a moment to go for a walk, neutralize my location, and really think about where these fears came from.
I realized that just four months into a new city that I love, I have found home within myself more than anywhere else.
For the first time in my life, really, I make the calls. I pick the home-improvement projects, literally and figuratively. I am building the home that I will live in for the rest of my life in how I treat, learn, and love myself. A change in location is simply an extension to the foundation I have built. Home is at the core of who I am and who I am becoming.
As I grow older, home feels like a long conversation with an old friend where we pick up right where we left off. It feels like returning to my college campus and retracing the steps that my friends and I used to take on our way to class while we wondered where we would all end up. It feels like learning that I love to do something new and spending hours making up for lost time mastering the craft. It feels like hitting it off with someone new and realizing how much life lies ahead, and maybe that isn’t so scary anymore, but inviting instead.
As we navigate our worlds and the new faces in them, sometimes all it takes is a look inward to remember that there is only one person that has been there for it all: You. While I lay awake at 3 a.m., panicked about the future, I see an allure in the chance to get to know myself in the coming years and the gift in carrying that with me wherever I go.
While I uncover new additions to who I am, I know that there will always be big pieces of home found in friendships and relationships that never leave you, they might just live in different cities. When I distance myself from fear, I realize that a scattered home is far from scarce. It is abundant and ever-expanding with each step that I take and new faces that I meet along the way. And when I remember that home lives within me, I’m more and more excited to come home every day.
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