` 2016-11

26/11/2016

Displacement


Today, I arrived back home after more than two months away. It's longest I've ever been away from home and I'm only here for one night.

I have realised that home isn't quite where I feel the most comfortable anymore. After all, almost every one of my most loved possessions remain in Southampton. The room I have at university is something which I have made my own and it is full of things that I have bought with my own money.
There is no sign of childhood rag dolls, gifts from distant relatives, certificates from my grade 2 piano. My bedroom walls at home are still adorned with self-painted green spots - a very non-aesthetically pleasing brainwave of my 13 year old self. At 20 years old, it feels childish.

In the right frame of mind, I do enjoy sleeping in my childhood room once again. The nostalgia is warm and welcoming. Yet, I'm at a crucial time of transition from student to employed adult and the lure of full independence renders me giddy with excitement and sometimes nauseous with nerves. My desire to launch myself into a journalism career fills every crevice in my brain and when memories of full dependence gets in the way, I'm irritable.

After all, my university bedroom is where I plan everything for the university paper. It's where I write all my applications, finalise my CV and flick through post-graduate prospectuses. Naturally, I've come to associate it with the place where I can safely look at my future and know that I am heading in the right direction.

Home is where the heart is and my heart is set on something other than a place where there is a power shower and Dad's bolognese.

In addition to that, what was home has changed. Since my brother now lives with my mum during the week, and I live in Southampton, my Dad is usually alone in the house apart from an attention hungry cat and a geeky lodger who works for a rice company. After one cat dies and a lodger moves in, dynamics change. Thus, predictably, it starts to feel less and less like home.

And so, I feel as though I am heading towards displacement. Once I graduate, I highly doubt I'll be renting straight away. I'll probably move back home for a little while and find my feet as an unemployed graduate seeking any kind of grounding.