By Marissa Essenburg | Sports Writer
Oftentimes, we take for granted that there are places where we belong. Places that hold us, shape us and feel like home. Places where we are loved and able to love back. What we don’t expect is the quiet grief that follows us out the door — the kind that settles in when leaving one place hurts and leaving another hurts too. The kind that makes you question why it hurts to go, and why it hurts to stay.
For many of us, that unexpected grief shows up as guilt for being sad to leave home and just as sad to leave school. College prepares us for change, independence and building something new, but I never expected it to prepare me for the moment when leaving both places feels equally heavy.
As A.A. Milne writes in “Winnie-the-Pooh,” “How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.”
Growing up in a household where my siblings and I categorized our family members as characters from “Winnie-the-Pooh,” the book was bound to be quoted at some point in the day. It’s a quote I could recite from age 6, but one I never truly understood until I felt the weight of what it meant to belong in a place other than where I was expected to.
Luck explains the depth of the sadness, but it doesn’t erase the guilt that comes with it. Loving two places does not make leaving either one easier. Instead, it adds a quiet pressure to be grateful when what you really feel is grief.
From a young age, I was always leaving. Sleepaway camps filled my summers, sports carried me across the country and home became something I passed through more than stayed in. So when it came time for college, far from my parents and the city I had lived in my whole life, I thought I was prepared.
Or at least, that’s what I told myself.
When I left the only home I’d ever known four years ago as a naive 18-year-old, I was sure I would find my place the moment I stepped on campus. I couldn’t have been more wrong. I missed my mom, my friends and my home. I wanted to find my place, but I couldn’t understand why it was taking so long.
What I didn’t know then was how quickly time would slip away. It feels like yesterday that my parents drove off and left me at my dorm, not four years ago. These years redefined the girl I was into the woman I am now, in ways far greater than I ever thought possible.
What I came to understand even faster was the feeling that followed every time I went back and forth. That familiar pit in my stomach. The sadness of leaving home, paired with the guilt of feeling that same sadness when it was time to leave school. I loved my friends, my college house, this little town, but I also loved what awaited me two hours down the road.
The quiet question of why loving a place so deeply could make going back feel just as hard as leaving always lingered.
Psychologists call it ambivalence — the experience of holding mixed, even contradictory emotions at the same time. Joy for what’s ahead and sadness for what you’re leaving behind.
It’s a guilt tied to that sadness that is less about ingratitude and more about belonging.
There is something undeniably special about home. Home is good for the soul, as many of us know it to be. And while it might be the house itself that holds the memories, more often than not, it’s the people who give a place its meaning.
Home doesn’t stay singular. It expands. What once lived in one place begins to exist in another, and suddenly, leaving feels heavier because there’s more to miss. Missing ‘home’ isn’t a weakness, it’s gratitude in disguise.
Because the truth is, what a gift that is — to cherish two places deeply, to hold them both with care, in a world where so many people never get the chance to feel that kind of belonging at all.
So instead of questioning why it hurts, maybe we should start asking what it meant. Loving two places at once doesn’t make us ungrateful, it makes us human.
