True Life: I Can't Believe I'm Back at Home


 I've been a college graduate for a week and two days now. For the past 4 years, I've spent majority of my time in the mountains at WCU. Every school year I began to come home less and call my college town "home" more. Yet here I am 4 years later back in the place I was once so familiar with but now it is somehow different. Buildings that I'd drive by regularly have been knocked down and old towns have begun to be gentrified. While this is the real home I know and love, it's unfamiliar.




For the first 3 days of being back home, I found myself wondering in Walmart everyday. Now Cullowhee and Sylva only had one major shopping area which was Walmart. I would find myself wondering in and around the aisles for almost whole hours while talking on the phone because there wasn't much else to do. However, Walmart sort of connected me to home. Here, it is up the street so while the unfamiliarity of the mountains was there, so was the comfort of the Walmart. Now here I am, removed of the college town with one major road and I find myself wondering in the Walmart. It's what makes me feel close to the place I once called home.



On the 3rd day, I realized all of this while also realizing that I was lost.


For the past 4 years, every day of my life was planned out. There was school, work, friends, sisters, and meetings. There was purpose. If I found myself wondering around campus, I could end up at a program or running into a friend. Here, there is none of that. I have to give my days meaning and have to plan to see my friends or my sisters. For months during my senior year I was so ready for all of it to be done. I didn't realize I didn't have a plan for life outside of school besides the job I had planned to start. A part of me still assumes that in the Fall I'll be heading back to school and getting to see all of the familiar faces. I honestly haven't grasped that I need to unpack my bag and get settled.



In school we're constantly prepared for getting a job after school. For years we're held in a gated community where we're shielded from the outside world. After our time is up, we're thrown out onto the streets with only the preparation of begging for a job. We're not told how to adjust to life on the streets, we're not told how to take care of ourselves without the guidance of our parents/guardians or of our professors. We're not given a grace period of readjusting to our parents/guardians rules.



If I could go back, I don't know if I would rush the process as much. I think I would take a little more time to take in the mountains, to make time with my friends, to enjoy the fountain. I took for granted my last moments I had on campus as a students. Never again will I be just a phone call away to take a friend to grab medicine. I won't be able to just walk in the ICA and listen to the daily news of Western. I won't be in a little place where majority of us are in the same age range and going through mini life crises that we somehow all understand.



Truly, I can't believe I'm back at home.



P.S. Enjoy some of my pictures from graduation with my family.

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