Two years ago if you would have run into me eating dinner at Runk or reading after class in Clark Hall and you asked me how I liked college so far, I would have gushed about how much I love it and how it was so much better than high school. Now that I really understand what it means to love college, I have a confession to make: I didn't love college at first. Even though I was ready to move on from high school, in the weeks before I left for Charlottesville, I was really dreading it. Once I arrived, I was more homesick than I'd ever been, but I felt like admitting I was homesick was admitting defeat, so I updated my Facebook status with overly excited raves about my new life and marched on.
I tend to wrestle with the same demons over and over, and homesickness has been one of them for a long time. More specifically, I've always hated leaving my mom. In preschool, my mom had to bribe me to go to school. The ladies working the carpool always had to pull me out of the car and walk me down the hall to class. At the end of the day, I would be reunited with my mom and she would always have a little trinket waiting for me on my car seat. Even though the lyrics to one of songs we sang in class was, "my Mommy comes back, she always comes back to get me," I clearly did not get the memo. Wheras most kids are excited to go to kindergarten and leave their baby days behind, I cried every day before school for two weeks and the principal had to walk me to class. Finally the embarrassment outweighed my hatred of leaving my mother behind, and I walked to class without a problem.
We know I didn't hate just going to school, because even when my mom wasn't dropping me off somewhere, I didn't want to leave her side. Case in point, when my grandparents wanted a picture of all their grandchildren, I refused to be in the picture unless my mom was in it too. So I sat in her lap and she ducked behind me. At first glance, you don't really notice her, but when you do, it's in the running for most awkward family photo ever.
Thankfully, I eventually learned to live my life without my mom 10 feet away. And though I did cry myself to sleep every night for a week at Girl Scout camp when I was 10, I think we can all agree you would be homesick too if the only bathroom you had was a hole in the ground.
My next major bout of homesickness came when I was 15 and went to Europe for three weeks with a student ambassador program. Although I went on the trip with my best friend, we were separated for the part of the trip when we did home stays with a French host family. My host family did not speak English, and I had only taken two years of French so despite the loving French family surrounding me, I felt extremely alone. Being with someone else's family only made me miss my own even more, so I used my calling card to call home and bawled on the phone for my entire French family to hear for a good hour. Once I got off the phone, my French family was so empathetic and went out of their way to make me feel at home. Their remedy? Find Lizzie McGuire on television and give me a Coke to drink. Viva America!
Based on my past experiences, I knew when I moved to Charlottesville I would probably be homesick. But the homesickness I experienced as a first year was a different kind of homesickness. It wasn't that I wanted to go home and live with my parents forever - I was astute enough to realize that wouldn't make me happier. I was homesick for high school because in high school, I had it all figured out. I knew who I was going to eat lunch with, I knew which readings I could skim, I knew who I would be hanging out with on weekends and I had leadership positions which fed my self-confidence. Now that I was in college, I had to figure all of that out again.
During the past two years, I've pieced together an amazing life in college and once again figured out all of these things. But it wasn't an easy process, as I remind my sister - who is a homesick freshman at James Madison University - every night when she calls me. I went to countless interest meetings to figure out which clubs I actually wanted to join. It took me a long time to realize having two places I call home is actually kind of cool - if celebrities can split their time between two cities, so can I. As time has gone by, I've found my best friends
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