Over fall break, a group of friends and I road-tripped to southern Georgia, exploring nearby coastlines and crashing at my aunt and uncle’s house each night. It was undoubtedly a good time: jokes were told, laughs were shared and — for lack of a less-clichéd phrase — memories were made.
But throughout the trip, I caught myself occasionally overcompensating and covering up for slight idiosyncrasies and oddities on behalf of each of my family members. When my uncle brought up politics, I hurriedly intervened and steered the conversation in another direction.
Granted, that’s a relatively normal mediation. I think it’s fair to say plenty of people avoid talking politics over the dinner table, especially when there are highly conflicting views present at said table and the representatives on either side each of the issue have tendencies to raise their voices and get argumentative.
But this realization of my own actions — the covering up, the intervening, the gently pre-supposed embarrassment — highlighted my own previously unrecognized consciousness of my family members’ various eccentricities. They were traits and peculiarities I had grown up seeing and was accustomed to, but ones I sought to hide in the presence of new friends.
I’ve noticed this pattern a fair amount over the course of the past semester. It seems as if each time a break from school approaches, I excitedly count down the moments to being reunited with long-unseen family members, only to be left feeling disenchanted by the disparity between how I imagined our reunion playing out and its reality.
I used to chalk this sensation up to other people changing, to family members and old friends shifting their own personalities and attitudes in the time frame between my leaving for college a year and a half ago and my occasional weekend or holiday returns back. But it’s not them, it’s me. In leaving home, coming to college and creating a separate life for myself, I’ve stepped further away from the world I grew up in than I had ever realized.
I don’t know if I would say I’ve fundamentally changed as a person, but I have certainly been exposed to situations and people who have changed my way of thinking. I don’t fit into the old box of myself so cleanly and clearly anymore. I think more in shades than in black and white. To be totally honest, I’m also not sure how much of this change — this enlargement and extension of perspective, this increasing independence — is due only to “being in college.”
There’s a scene in the cheesy-sounding-but-nevertheless-wonderful film “Stuck in Love” in which the protagonist, a renowned author, tells his son, also an aspiring writer, “a writer is the sum of their experiences. Go get some.”
A bit unintentionally, I’ve followed this advice. And in so doing, I’ve returned home countless times expecting everything to be as it was before I left. Simply put: it’s not. It’s not entirely on me, nor is it entirely on anyone else. Rather, it’s a result of the fact that people change. And when you have the opportunity to change while away from people rather than alongside them, this change is often uncomfortable.
What I’m experiencing isn’t disappointment in what others have become, it’s disillusionment. Growing up, I thought everyone in my family was, essentially, flawless: big-hearted, vibrant, intelligent. As I’ve grown up and gone away, I still see those good attributes, but I’ve also become more cognizant of the quirks and questions which were always there but I didn’t notice before spending time on my own. The family I know now is not the faultless one I thought I knew before, but I’m not disappointed. Despite the now-noticed lack of perfection, I still adore the people I grew up looking up to.
Distance is good. It’s a fickle friend, and I’m certainly still struggling with it. But at the end of the day, distance forces one to change and age, and in that process, one becomes a fuller, more complex version of themselves. I’ve changed, I’ve aged, and in the process, I’ve gotten to see those I love do the same. The reward? A more complete picture of not only myself, but of others too.
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