This Is What It’s Like To Come ‘Home’ After College

By

It feels empty. It feels cluttered. It feels like you failed, even though you didn’t. It’s hard packing your life up and leaving it behind.

It’s hard knowing that even if you go back to visit it won’t be the same. You won’t have your routine, your classes or your job. You won’t be able to walk through the front door you’ve walked through so many times.

You won’t have anything other than visits ahead of you. Everything that once was yours there will no longer will be. Someone else will come along and replace you because the sad truth is no one is irreplaceable.

When you look around your empty house for one last time and reminisce over the memories you’ve shared in there it’s a heavy weight on your shoulders. Moving on is hard. Leaving behind your life is even harder.

It’s the last glance at your bedroom that you’ve become so comfortable in. It’s the last glance at the living room you’ve lied around with friends in so many times. It’s the backyard that you’ve partied in. It’s everything that’s making it so hard to walk away.

The transition home is hard because even though you try to tell yourself it’s just another summer, you know deep down it isn’t. You know that it’s come to an end. You have to accept that when your friends all go back in the fall that you won’t be joining them.

You move back into your high school room, hoping you won’t be here for long. Hopeful that something will come to you and you can leave again. Start fresh on your own again, but you also have nothing lined up. You feel like you’ve failed because you have no plans, but you shouldn’t feel that way.

You should feel proud. Feeling sad is natural and it’s good because it means you had a great experience. It means you have great friends that make it so hard to walk away from.

Coming home sucks, you miss your friends and your freedom. You miss your college town and your friends. You feel like everything you grew to love so much was just taken from you and that’s one of the worst feelings, that you’ve lost everything you loved in the one place that finally started feeling like home.

Don’t panic though, because it’s not forever. Nothing is forever. You will find plans, you will move, and you will start a life of your own again. It might not be with your friends, but it will be good. It will be the next chapter. College isn’t as good as it gets and moving back home after it is not the worst thing that happened to you, but just keep working towards your goals and your dreams and everything will work out just fine.