What I miss about being home: I matter

In most cases, I feel blissfully nonchalant about coming home for breaks. I don't necessarily dread it; I just don't feel the same enthusiasm for going home as most of my friends and classmates do. But this year was different. I couldn't wait to get home, not necessarily because I needed time off campus (though now that I think about it, that is part of the reason), but because I actually matter when I'm home.

I struggled a lot this year with being me. I'm not even talking about those dramatic teens who pull crazy rebellious stunts under the guise of "trying to find their identity." It's just that, during this past year, my identity has been swallowed up by my roommate.

If I'm having a bad day, she's having a worse one. If I find something new or cool or amusing, it's just 'whatever' to her. If I accomplish something pretty significant in my life, she's got a story waiting to be told about how she achieved some major accomplishment that will blow mine right out of the water. Seriously. Everything that could possibly happen to me, whether it was a positive or a negative, suddenly became about her. She has that kind of power. No matter how uniquely individual I might think my case is, she'll come up with a way to turn it around and make it about her.

So I couldn't wait to go home because I knew that at home, I would be entitled to my range of emotions, both the negative and positive ones. If I was having an off day, I wouldn't have to worry about somehow being entered in a competition of who had the worse day. I had my bad day, and even if someone else had a bad day, it didn't necessarily trump mine. If I achieved something particularly good or amazing, I could be happy about it and have the (mostly) full support of everyone around me. I mattered. I was allowed to be a human being and do human things and feel human emotions.

That's the thing I've learned about being yourself. You have a right to be yourself. No one, no matter how important they think they are, has the right to take that away from you. If you want to be really pissed off about something trivial, then go ahead. If you want to cry in public about your goldfish that died six months ago, by all means, please do. If you won a gold medal at your local spelling bee and want to celebrate by eating two whole pies of pizza by yourself, do it. If you earned a certificate for breaking the record of hot dogs eaten in an hour at a local restaurant, you go hang that certificate in a prominent place in your house where people will definitely see it. Heck, frame that sucker. You are you. Own it. 

That's what I've been enjoying in the couple days that I've been home. I've just been enjoying being me, and more importantly, being allowed to be me. It's a pretty refreshing idea, and I can't say that I won't miss it when I have to go back to school .