By The Editorial Board
There’s no place like home. The streetlights outside your college house don’t quite buzz like the ones by your childhood home, your mom’s recipes never turn out the same when you attempt them by yourself and suddenly, you’re closer to 30 than being a kid yourself.
Sometimes, college can feel in-between. You get used to living on your own, and then, four months later, you’re suddenly back in your childhood bedroom, at home yet living out of a suitcase.
At some point, many of us might have stopped calling our hometown home. The apartments, houses and even residence halls at college somehow replaced the cities we respond with when someone asks where we’re from.
And as we finally get settled into said college homes, change rocks our worlds again. While The Editorial Board might seem like an omnipresent being publishing several times a week, many of us are graduating seniors, wondering where we will end up after calling so many different places home.
There’s a bit of a stigma associated with post-grad living plans. For some, moving far away from home to go to school was intentional. If you spent four years building a home in a new place, sometimes it might feel like you’re moving backward to return to the hometown you left behind.
In a world full of success and hustle culture, watching the friends you grew up with pack their bags to move to their dream city might spark feelings of insecurity.
Despite this, it’s important to remember that everyone is on their own path, on their own time. It might not sound as glamorous as a packed U-Haul barreling its way to a new city, but returning to your hometown post-grad is just as fulfilling.
In a time full of uncertainty, being home is an underrated comfort. Closing a chapter of your life doesn’t mean you have to put the book back on the shelf. You might not be the same kid who rushed in from playing outside when your mom called for dinner, but moving back home allows for a different cultivation of the same relationships that raised you.
Post-grad, you aren’t the rowdy adolescent that needed constant guidance or an angsty teen who thought parents were their mortal enemies. Being an adult means having a new sense of appreciation for your parents, and moving back home doesn’t mean you’re a failure — on the contrary, it demonstrates a new sense of maturity and personal growth.
Emotional comfort aside, moving back home isn’t always a sacrifice based on lack of opportunity — it’s a smart, intentional financial choice.
RentCafe reports that the average price of an apartment in the U.S. is around $1,700 a month, varying by state. The average price of a house rests at about $350,000, which is close to the cost of a four-year degree at Baylor. That’s a pretty steep number, and unfortunately, that part-time campus job at $9 an hour might not be conducive to saving up for a down payment.
Certainly, most of you have heard the phrase “home is where the heart is.” Just like those cheesy Hallmark movies, home truly is what you make of it. For some, home might be moving to a new city and not knowing anyone, which might be the right path for them. Your path might circle you back to familiar territory, and that’s perfectly OK.
You must make decisions based on your own life, finances and emotional needs. There might be a brand new world out there ready to be explored, but there’s also a steady one that brought you to this very crossroads. Despite what self-help influencers might say online, it is possible to grow within your comfort zone instead of outside it.
In the wise words of Stevie Nicks, go your own way. Focus on yourself and live your own life. A home can be built anywhere you wish, but sometimes one is already waiting for you that requires little more than the strength to choose it. By all means, explore new places, try new things and see new sights, but at the end of the day, there’s no place like home.
