Lessons Learned: (Re)making home at Occidental

I was in Spain in the fall, and now I am here, both again and for the first time. While Occidental could hardly be called stagnant, it is steady. The squirrels still beg for food on the quad, the Newcomb bathrooms still smell. I am a bit averse to the romantic idea that I’ve changed while everything else has stayed the same (because I’m sure everyone and everything here has changed too), but there is a sense that I must return to the person I was while I was here. I think the uncomfortable part is realizing that, in a way, I’m in my first year again. Or maybe every return home is an attempt to fit yourself back into a space that has once more become strange to you, or you to it.

My time in Salamanca, Spain was a wonderfully uncomfortable few months. I can’t pretend that living in a beautiful town in Europe was any kind of hardship, but I can say that I had many personal adjustments to make during the experience, which was to be expected and even welcomed. By the end of the semester, I was immeasurably grateful for the memories I made, the friends I met, the slower, more intentional life I was fortunate enough to lead. But I won’t pontificate here about the aspects that made studying abroad, without question, worth the effort.

In truth, as the final weeks approached, I was eager to return home. The discomfort of living in unfamiliarity had grown tiring, and I missed — well, everything and everyone. I should caveat this by saying I live about 45 minutes away from Occidental, so I’ve never been away from home for longer than a couple of weeks.

And eventually, home I came! I was content and full and cozy as time passed over winter break, and I took in the faces of people who I had grown accustomed to seeing over FaceTime and ate the foods I had grown used to going without.

Now, we’re finally back — “we” being me and some of my closest friends who also embarked on their semesters abroad in the fall — and it’s joyful if not peculiar to be returning to our usual routines of overstimulating meals in the MP, studying in the library or watching movies in our dorm rooms.

Despite it all, I can’t shake a feeling of discomfort not so dissimilar to the one I felt in Spain.

I wrote an email about my anxieties of studying abroad in the airport in August. In it, I said I was worried that I was mistakenly subscribing to an idea perpetuated in the media that, as a young person, I needed to go, alone, somewhere far and foreign in order to become myself or to grow. As a person with Spanish and Mexican ancestry, I also had complicated feelings about going specifically to Spain to learn Spanish. It was both a return to a place where I have genetic roots but also a journey to the homeland of a people that conquered others I am descended from. I’ve reconciled with my choice of country and my choice to go abroad in general, even if it was inspired by a privileged dream of a travel-based coming-of-age story.

I’m now under the impression that growth takes place not while existing within the newness but more often when you take the newness back with you, absorbing it into yourself and morphing into an amalgamation of your experiences.

I think the uncomfortable part is reconciling everything you’ve learned and seen. It leaves you a bit unbalanced or uncertain. When I wave to someone I haven’t seen in months, am I waving as the person who they last saw almost a year ago or as someone else? Am I naive or egocentric to assume that a few months in a new country could even result in tangible changes in myself that could be perceivable to anyone else?

Before I left for Spain, I would have said that Occidental, despite the difficulties that do exist in being a student here, felt like home. I was sure of my place here, and it had taken time to get to that headspace. Now, although many of the comforting and lovely things from my sophomore year still exist as part of my experience — my job, my friends, my major, my roommate — the idea of it being “home” doesn’t ring entirely true. Maybe it’s because I now know I can make a home for myself somewhere else. Does that mean, then, that home is something I carry within me? Something that I bring to a place, not something that a place provides to me?

Not to bring up Nietzsche — as a CSLC major and CTSJ minor, I’m a bit obliged to mention at least one theorist — but I’m inclined to think about the idea of the eternal return of the same. The event of coming to a place and feeling uncomfortable and uncertain is bound to repeat itself throughout the course of my life. I must make home again and again. It is odd, to say the least, to make home in a place that once was home before, but it’s not impossible. And a disconcerting experience, much like the choice to go abroad in the first place, is to be welcomed. There’s so much “becoming” to be had both now and in the future, and I am simultaneously reluctant and lucky that I have the opportunity to “become” yet again at Occidental.

Contact Ava LaLonde at lalonde@oxy.edu