Home For The Holidays

I recently made my first trip home since beginning my new college career. Even though I was warned incessesantly about the changes I would undergo during my first year of college by others who had already made the transition, I was still surprised at the life I left behind.

No one has changed; life continues the way it always seems to in a small town. However, my role seems to have disappeared from the radar screen. Maybe it was the lack of my towel hanging in the bathroom or the funny looks I received at church, but something gave me an incredibly quesy feeling in the bottom of my stomach.

See, this is what it boils down to: for eighteen years, my life and goals have centered around being accepted to and receiving scholarships to a respectable university. My church family, school teachers, music teachers, and family were all very active participants in my achievement of this goal. All pushed, encouraged, molded, and made me into the young woman who would be able to leave to pursue a new life of my own.

But leaving and attending college involves much more that your leaders and role models either choose to ignore or don't realize. It involves pursuing a new life with new goals, new role models, new friends, and a new family. I don't have to completely break the ties with my old life at home. I do, however, have to be shared.

This idea of being shared between two separate worlds is perhaps the largest factor in the production of the quesy feeling in my stomach. At home, the beliefs, values, and traditional thought patterns prevail in my mind. There is only one way to accomplish things, and it is force-fed into your brain from the instant you open your eyes. Here, I am meeting so many new people, and learning so many different views of controversial and touchy subjects. It seems that I am stagnant in regards to my views on these subjects or even life in general.

Do you know the feeling you get when you return home after you've been on vacation? You may or may not have had a wonderful time, but nothing compares to the feeling of "coming home." I suppose my biggest problem is that I do not get that feeling when I return home or when I return to Birmingham. I am floating.

So life is tough, huh? Try this double life that I am being forced to lead at so young an age. Next time the sarcastic remark, "You can come home, you know," forms in your mind, remember all of those floaters out there, who just haven't found themselves yet.