Nowhere Feels Like Home

I am 214 miles away from home. At least, that’s what Google Maps says. But to be honest, I’m no longer sure where that home actually is — which feels especially strange now, as I write my last article before winter break at my favorite seat in Frost Library. For a whole month, I’ll be “home” without really knowing where that is or what that means anymore.

Thinking back to the first time I left Amherst College, I realize it was harder than I expected. Leaving Amherst at the end of my freshman year was unbearable (I cried on the way out). I didn’t want to go home — in fact, I didn’t even want to leave my lovely two-room double in James Hall. That tiny, overheated room with the flickering overhead light and walls covered in half-taped posters of artworks and maps had shaped me. It was there that I became myself, the version of me that felt most real to me.

I don’t talk to my mom very often, at least not as often as she’d probably like (hi Mom, I know you’re reading this). Part of it is the busyness of life, but part of it is that her voice reminds me of “home” in a way that isn’t always comforting. For a while, I thought that meant my home had shifted to Amherst — that maybe, finally, I belonged here. And in some ways, maybe I do. But the truth is, even here, home” still feels uncertain.

That word is strange. Home. The way I think about it is that it’s supposed to be solid, comforting, unchanging. But for me, it’s slippery. I think about unlocking my apartment door back at “home” and feeling like I’m entering someone else’s life. I think about how I act differently in each of these places, like switching between tabs on a computer screen. And lately, I can’t shake this question: What does “home” mean when every version of it feels temporary and performed?

I was born in Dallas, though I have no real memory of it — just the idea of a city meant to be my first anchor. Before I started kindergarten, my mom and I moved to New Jersey, where I glimpsed what permanence might feel like. Before settling anywhere “for real,” I stayed with various relatives for months at a time, learning to navigate other people’s rules while carving out space for myself — the smell of old carpet, creaking floorboards, the constant feeling of being a guest.

Then came the house I lived in for 14 years with my mom on the Jersey Shore — the home I thought would last forever. I knew its nooks and crannies: The 18 steps from my bedroom to my mom’s office, the cold drafts through west-side windows, the peeling linoleum in the kitchen, the annual chore of moving the Christmas tree. Imperfect, but stable. For years, I thought that was home.

Then it was gone, bulldozed — not by our choice. Losing it meant moving into strange, impersonal apartments, one after another. The familiar creaks and drafts of my childhood were replaced with walls that could have been anywhere. Home became something I had to actively construct — to rebuild each time, rent from strangers, and carefully perform a sense of stability even when I didn’t feel it. Each word carries its weight: rebuild because I was piecing together a life that felt permanent but wasn’t; rent because there was always a transactional, temporary aspect to it; and perform because I had to act as if everything was settled and secure, even when it wasn’t. That’s when I realized the word itself could no longer be trusted. “Home” was not guaranteed, not permanent, and maybe never would be.

Arriving at Amherst my freshman year was like stepping onto a new planet, and I hoped I would find where home was. The air smelled different, colder, sharper than the Jersey Shore I had grown up on, and everything was quieter and smaller. Moving into my freshman dorm, I had a geography to learn — the twists of the hallways, a different number of steps to my room (so far from everyone and everything), the way sunlight hit my window at different hours. There were new rituals like having to walk to Valentine Hall every day multiple times a day for food, navigating a shared laundry room in the James and Stearns basement (the horrors I saw last year), among so many other things. And there were new people — people who were unlike anyone I’ve ever been around.

In high school, I always felt like the weird kid — and I don’t mean that in a “pick me” way, just in a way that set me apart. Part of it was being a lesbian in a school with few queer students, part of it was being anxious and depressed, and part of it was just who I was. Friendships were hard to come by, and I never fully felt at home in my own skin. Even now, when I go back home, that feeling hasn’t disappeared — and I’m not sure it ever will.

But here, at Amherst, I feel more like myself than I ever did at “home.” Here, I could evolve without the weight of old expectations, without the sense that I had to perform the version of me everyone remembered. The daughter everyone wanted me to be, or I had thought I was. 

Physically, I look very different now — a new haircut, tattoos, piercings, a completely different style of clothes. I’ve reached a point where I’m genuinely happy with who I am and the way I present myself, which is a far cry from how I used to feel. People at home often tell me I’ve really come into my own since coming to college, and hearing that feels strange, like they’re noticing a version of me I barely recognize myself. I’m not entirely recognizable to people from home, and sometimes, not even to the person I once was (all in a good way).

Mentally, I feel like I’ve stretched into someone new too. But even here, at Amherst, I don’t fully feel at home. Don’t get me wrong, I love it all  — the weather, my classes, my friendships, myself. But I’m living a strange life. We all are, really — we go to class, we study, we party, we repeat — and sometimes, it feels less like living and more like orbiting. I don’t quite settle into myself here the way I thought I would. I thought college would hand me a ready-made version of “home,” some idealized belonging I could step into like a room already furnished. But that’s not real. Amherst has taught me that. Even the places that feel freeing, that let me become someone new, can feel temporary too — like I’m borrowing this version of myself for a semester at a time.

And I know I’m not alone in this. I’ve had versions of this same conversation with friends, classmates, people I barely know — all of us quietly confused about where “home” is supposed to be. Our generation has grown up with foreclosures, rising rents, parents moving for work, and now the expectation that we’ll bounce between dorms, sublets, internships, and jobs every few months. Permanence isn’t really part of our vocabulary anymore. It’s no surprise that so many of us feel unrooted; we were raised in an economy and a culture that treats stability like a luxury good.

“Home,” to me, is a myth, a story we tell ourselves to feel stable in a world that is always shifting. I think that the real danger isn’t being without a physical home — it’s being too attached to the idea of home itself, expecting permanence from a world that doesn’t offer it. 

What complicates all of this is how easily we slip into performing stability, even when we don’t feel it. We decorate our dorm rooms like they’re permanent, we memorize new routines every semester, we tell people where we’re “from” even when the answer might not feel true anymore, since we now spend more time here than there. I guess we build little versions of home everywhere we go — a favorite seat in Frost, a group of people we eat dinner with, a coffee shop where the barista knows our usual order — and then tear them down the moment the semester ends. It’s strange to realize how much of young adulthood is spent rehearsing a sense of rootedness we don’t actually have. Maybe that’s why these places matter so much: Not because they are home, but because they let us pretend, even briefly, that we’ve arrived somewhere solid.

For me, young adulthood feels so strange — we’re still playing “house,” just in bigger, more complicated ways. We rent out Airbnbs with friends (I’ve rented a bunch, but my favorite was near Lake Placid, New York, where I got to cook on a woodstove in the middle of literally nothing but trees — and there was even a wood-steam hot tub thing), and cook in the Greenways, and pretend it’s our own little kitchen (I love making cookies — you might have been a lucky winner last Valentine’s Day when my friends and I baked about 100 of them. Nope, I’m not even joking. I’ll probably do it again this year, since it looks like I’ll be single yet again … I was so close).

We build these small, temporary homes, practicing the rituals of stability even when nothing around us truly is. It’s a game we’ve been playing since we were kids, and in some ways, we never stop. That’s why Sydney Ross Mitchell’s “Queen of Homecoming” hits me so hard. In the second verse, she sings: “I’m terribly sorry for the one homesick bone in my body / For the small part of me that somehow believes that/ Somewhere in Texas is something I need.” That lyric totally captures the part of us that clings to the idea of a fixed home, even when life keeps shifting. That “somewhere in Texas” — which, lowkey, is ironic for me — becomes this symbol for the anchor we’re always looking for: A stability or sense of belonging that might not even exist. 

Then in the chorus, she sings: “I hate going home, I feel like myself again / I can't even smile, I miss my boyfriend/ If I'm the star, it's still disappointing.” I won’t be missing a boyfriend anytime soon — unless it’s a lesbian boyfriend — but the sentiment still hits: Home can remind you of old expectations, old versions of yourself, and how even comfort can feel incomplete. The dissonance — the difference between who I am at home and who I am on campus — is painful. It reminds me of what I’ve lost, what I had to leave behind, the version of me that existed in New Jersey. But it’s also freeing. Because it reminds me that home is not a set of walls or an address. It’s the performance of comfort, the act of making a space, and a self, that I can inhabit, even briefly.