Before I left for college, I took home for granted. No matter how far I traveled, it was always there when I needed it, and no matter how long I was away, my bedroom stayed the same and gave me that familiar feeling of comfort and safety. When I left for college, I began to realize how important having a home was to understanding my identity. Throughout most of school, I still relied on my childhood home to sustain me—I would emotionally hold my breath until the next time I went home, when I would let out a sigh of relief and reset myself. But gradually, my home seemed to slip away from me…now that I am a college graduate, I no longer feel the familiar safety that it used to provide, and as a result I feel uncertain of my identity.
I feel as if I am scattered between three places, and no one place feels like my true home. The home I grew up in is no longer my home base because I have severed most of the ties of childhood dependence. My apartment doesn’t quite feel like home because even though it has all my stuff, it doesn’t have my boyfriend, and it feels too temporary because I am moving in a matter of months. My boyfriend’s place also doesn’t feel like my home because I didn’t help build it—while it has plenty of drawers and space for my clothes, it still existed before I did and is therefore more of an expression of my boyfriend’s identity. While this is one of the most rewarding phases of growth I’ve been through, it’s also one of the toughest. It’s hard enough to be a college graduate, facing the uncertainty of the future without the structure and familiarity of school, but I also have a fragmented identity and no one place to call home.
My challenge during this phase is to build an inner sense of support from scratch, and to find confidence outside of my ego. Lacking a distinct home base has made me feel out of control, as if I can’t locate my identity in time and space. This is a situation when the ego, which thrives on control and predictability, cannot rein supreme. I cannot rely on my ego to provide me with self-confidence because of how unpredictable this experience is. My growth during this phase of life involves finding a completely new sense of inner strength that persists no matter where I am and no matter how out of control I feel. I have to find stability in the unstable by accepting my feelings of discomfort, fear, and uncertainty instead of judging them or trying to stop them from happening. I also have to keep in mind that feeling out of control and losing my sense of self doesn’t makes me an outlier, isolated and alone, it makes me human and normal.
Whether we realize it or not, we all go through similar experiences of growth, and we all experience fear and uncertainty in times of change. Redefining our sense of self can be frightening at times, but the more we allow ourselves to confront the fear, the more we will solidify our inner strength and discover how brave we are.
