![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
So, there's something I don't get.
I've always looked forward to turning eighteen and moving out. My family rocks, but I never had a choice about moving in with them. Besides, moving out is what you do when you grow up, right? You do your own thing, you make your own way in the world, you get your own physical space as well as the space to make your own decisions.
I know I'm not the only person who takes this approach. Sure, there are plenty of people who stay with their families into adulthood, and that's fine if that's how you do things. But there were also plenty of people alongside me throughout adolescence, chomping at the bit to get out of their houses the day they hit eighteen. And some of them--not all, but some--did.
This is not unexpected, is it? As a country, we grant people legal adulthood at eighteen. It shouldn't be a surprise that some of us grab that and run with it. And yet both socially and bureaucratically, it's assumed that young people have a "home" with their parents. Clark refused to accept my college mailbox as my current address; since I now have an off-campus apartment, I called to change it to this one, and they initially refused to change it because it's a "summer residence, not a permanent residence." Financial aid is impossible to get without taking parental income information into account until the student is 25, even if the parents refuse to pay a cent; I know several people who have been thoroughly screwed over by this policy. I can't count the number of people who have asked whether I'm "going home" for a school break or for the summer, and telling them that I live here only gets a confused "I thought you were from California?"
It's not just college students, either. I hear real grownups with houses and kids and everything referring to visiting their parents as "going home." I don't understand. I visit my family members, and I enjoy those visits, but they're visits. When I go to Davis, where I was born and spent my childhood, it's pleasantly familiar as the place I grew up, but it's not home. To me, home is where I go at the end of the day. That was my parents' house, once. Then it was my grandparents' house. Then it was a dorm room. Now it's an apartment in Worcester, Massachusetts, with a couple of near-strangers who seem pretty nice. In the future, it might be my own place, or a place I share with people I love; it might be P's couch in Lyon, if I ever manage to get my butt across the Atlantic; it might even be an actual house of my own someday, unlikely as settling down feels to me now. But "home" doesn't mean someplace far away that I only see once or twice a year, and it seems very strange to me that that's what others expect it to mean.
I've always looked forward to turning eighteen and moving out. My family rocks, but I never had a choice about moving in with them. Besides, moving out is what you do when you grow up, right? You do your own thing, you make your own way in the world, you get your own physical space as well as the space to make your own decisions.
I know I'm not the only person who takes this approach. Sure, there are plenty of people who stay with their families into adulthood, and that's fine if that's how you do things. But there were also plenty of people alongside me throughout adolescence, chomping at the bit to get out of their houses the day they hit eighteen. And some of them--not all, but some--did.
This is not unexpected, is it? As a country, we grant people legal adulthood at eighteen. It shouldn't be a surprise that some of us grab that and run with it. And yet both socially and bureaucratically, it's assumed that young people have a "home" with their parents. Clark refused to accept my college mailbox as my current address; since I now have an off-campus apartment, I called to change it to this one, and they initially refused to change it because it's a "summer residence, not a permanent residence." Financial aid is impossible to get without taking parental income information into account until the student is 25, even if the parents refuse to pay a cent; I know several people who have been thoroughly screwed over by this policy. I can't count the number of people who have asked whether I'm "going home" for a school break or for the summer, and telling them that I live here only gets a confused "I thought you were from California?"
It's not just college students, either. I hear real grownups with houses and kids and everything referring to visiting their parents as "going home." I don't understand. I visit my family members, and I enjoy those visits, but they're visits. When I go to Davis, where I was born and spent my childhood, it's pleasantly familiar as the place I grew up, but it's not home. To me, home is where I go at the end of the day. That was my parents' house, once. Then it was my grandparents' house. Then it was a dorm room. Now it's an apartment in Worcester, Massachusetts, with a couple of near-strangers who seem pretty nice. In the future, it might be my own place, or a place I share with people I love; it might be P's couch in Lyon, if I ever manage to get my butt across the Atlantic; it might even be an actual house of my own someday, unlikely as settling down feels to me now. But "home" doesn't mean someplace far away that I only see once or twice a year, and it seems very strange to me that that's what others expect it to mean.
