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FRESHMAN JOURNAL |
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My two homes
By Emily Kellogg, University of Toronto
I'm writing this next to the Pacific Ocean. It's a windy day but surprisingly sunny for an early summer's day on the central coast of California. Layers of damp and gray fog usually dull the sight of jagged rocks jutting into the ocean. But today, things are in clear view and I can see into the infinite depth of the horizon. The waves are white-caped and smashing into the stubborn rocks, seagulls are dive-bombing unsuspecting tourists, and runners, preoccupied with the ocean, rather than following their feet, are stumbling on pebbles on a trail along the coast,
These sights are devastatingly familiar. I was fortunate enough to go to high school just a couple of minutes away from the beach. Being here reminds visits taken to old childhood haunts.
A jungle gym that once seemed a feat of strength and agility to climb, now barely reaches above your head. The places don't necessarily change, but you return with a new perspective—and perspective is both physical and mental. Sure, I'm taller now, I can stand on a desk and recite Captain O' Captain to Robin Williams and look at things from new angles, and play tricks with my senses—but a change of perception isn't always so obvious.
Sometimes, your perception changes, and you're not taller, you're not standing at a new vantage point—you've just changed, and everything looks just a little bit different.
And so here I am, at the sight of my adolescence. Using the broadest sense of the term, this should be home. And so, adhering to the broadest sense of the term, that aching longing at the bottom of my stomach that I call homesickness, shouldn't be there. This is a common symptom of college life, I've been told—all of a sudden you have created two homes for yourself. That can be a good thing—I mean, I've proved to myself that I can do anything and go anywhere, and be assured that I'll come out of it ok. And straight out of the metaphorical “nest” it allows (or forces) a student to plummet or take flight.
But then again, Elizabeth Wurtzel described a certain type of this feeling in her Prozac Nation, "…homesickness is just a state of mind for me. I'm always missing someone or someplace or something, I'm always trying to get back to some imaginary somewhere. My life has been one long longing." Sylvia Plath talks about flying back and forth between two mutually exclusive constructs as the basis of neurosis in her The Bell Jar. But as university students, our lives have just kicked up that transitory thing a notch. Nothing ever is, everything is always becoming.
As students, our life simultaneously straddles two mutually exclusive realms—of society, ideology and the rest of the narcissism of minor differences that comes from a geographical move. So we mutually exist in both of our homes, literally flying back between the two.
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