What I learned when I moved away from home

I am a homebody.

Don’t get me wrong, I am all about adventures. But when it comes to a Saturday night, I would rather be home cuddling with my dog and watching Harry Potter. This is a typical Saturday in El Segundo for me. I hang out with my family or friends, maybe drive to Santa Monica and back if we are feeling like wasting some gas.

Most of my friends stayed relatively close to home when it came to college. I was the one who went the furthest. When Saturday rolls around, it’s always hard seeing their Snapchats of what we used to do, but that’s a part of growing up. Sometimes you have to create space to realize what you miss the most.

As teenagers we take everything for granted. It’s in our DNA — our cars, the shows we watch, the concerts we get to go to, the sports we play. We act like it is a given that we are going to do all that we can and not have to worry about the repercussions.

We do the same with people’s feelings. We take the people we love for granted. We allow ourselves to get so caught up in the now that we forget about the past and how it has brought us to where we are standing currently. We forget to look at things from the eye of the beholder. We get lost in our own delusions of grandeur until suddenly without warning everything we want is gone.

College has made me realize just how much distance made me appreciate the things I miss from back home

And then suddenly we are left to pick up the pieces. We promise not to let ourselves make the same mistakes and yet when that song comes on we text the person it reminds us of. Maybe that’s a part of growing. Maybe it shows us what we really want, I guess we will never truly know.

What I am getting at is we are so ready to grow up and leave the nest we have meticulously crafted. We hand picked the people we ate lunch with and shared our weekends with. The music in the car, the movies we went to, the places we ate — each and every place was something we grew accustomed to. Yet in the blink of an eye we are ready to jump from our nests and go into the real world.

And then when it’s time to leap — and move from our nice queen size bed to the twin XL that will be ours for the next eight months — it hits us. Maybe leaving isn’t what it’s all cracked up to be. Maybe being that homebody on a Saturday night isn’t that “lame.” We step out of our little bubbles and realize that over the course of the past 18 years we have been comfortable, some of us had to have a job, some of us had to study harder than others. But at the end of the day we were home.

College has made me realize just how much distance made me appreciate the things I miss from back home. I miss my mom, who was always up to try new things. I miss my grandma who always had a relatable life lesson. I miss going to see silly movies with my uncle and watching Sherlock with my granddad. I miss driving around with my friends blaring the myriad of music we grew up listening to and watching the same movies that we grew to love. I miss going to the same beaches and parks, walking my dog on the same route everyday. I miss the little things that El Segundo brought me, and for that reason I cannot wait for summer when I can hop back into my routine.