Leaving a high school of 500 people to go to a massive university with tens of thousands of students is not a slight adjustment. I went to high school in Vermont in a small town where everyone knew everyone, the kind of town where nearly all of my classmates had parents who previously graduated from my high school. Speaking a different language and being the child of immigrants, I never felt quite like I belonged there. Every day for the first 12 years of my education, I dreamed of escaping to a place where I could blend in.Â
My parents struggled to warm up to the idea of me going to college out of state, especially since there was a college near our house. When they finally caved and agreed that Boston was close enough for me to attend university, they constantly told me that I would find myself missing the endless fields and forests that flourish everywhere across my home state. They said I would get tired of the hecticness of city life and that I would relish the moments when I could go home to the green mountains. They were wrong.Â
Don’t get me wrong, I would not trade my upbringing in small-town Vermont for the world. Despite feeling like I was meant for something different, I found solace in my friends and community members, and for that, I am forever grateful. However, despite my emotional attachment to what will forever be my home, I have found respite in Boston. I have found sanity in the buildings that seem to go on forever, and I have found comfort in going to a school where I feel so beautifully insignificant.Â
Despite the numerous lows I’ve experienced in my first few months at college, not one second has gone by where I have wanted to go home. I felt trapped back home as if one wrong move could ruin my entire life. Here, in a city where there are thousands of people with thousands of problems that exist entirely separate from my being, I’ve never felt freer. This feeling was unexpected for both my parents and for me, and it has caused a new sense of guilt to blossom. I feel guilty for not missing home, for not missing such a fundamental component of my childhood.Â
I am not sure how I am supposed to reconcile this feeling of guilt with the newfound excitement that Boston brings. I was always scared of being stuck in rural Vermont forever, and now I almost feel worse for being right in thinking that I was meant for something bigger, somewhere bigger. I have to wonder if others feel this same sort of small-town survivor’s guilt or if anyone else has as complicated a definition of “home” as I do. Maybe there are others or maybe not, but I will continue to believe that I made the right choice for myself as I learn to cope with the guilt of wanting more.