"When Home Doesn't Feel Like Home Anymore"

Moving away from home can feel really confusing. All of a sudden, nineteen years of your life can fit into the back of a car and your room feels so much smaller now that you're not in it. Your childhood bedsheets are bundled around the vase you'll probably never use and the bowls mum gave you as a moving-in present keep rattling. All your clothes are folded away in boxes so you've been wearing the same pair of jeans for three days but insist on taking all of your shoes despite the fact you definitely won't ever wear heels at uni.

Although, there's only so much romanticization to distract you from why everything feels so out of reach when you uproot your life from one place and try to grow in another.

Unfamiliar places are hard to feel home in - wanting your feet to land smoothly but feeling like you're floating is a confusing and bitter reality to accept. The admission of feeling like you have everything and nothing simultaneously, along with all that is familiar seeming so far away but not wanting to quite yet adjust to how quickly everything is changing, is not a feeling that I ever felt prepared for. And whilst I'm so proud of myself and grateful that this is the life I've earnt, there's days when all I want to do is crawl in bed with my mum and feel safe again.

Home does feel a bit distant now and at times the disconnection I feel can be too much but it's part of moving away, part of creating your own life and one that feels like a "home", even if it's different to what I'm used to.