I had a weird experience with placing my "home" throughout my university years. When I was really young we lived in a few different houses that I barely remember, but from the ages of four to seventeen I lived in the same house. Then, two weeks before I moved away to university, my family moved. It wasn't across the country or anything, just to a different community on the south shore of Nova Scotia, but I didn't exactly have much time to settle in.
So through my first two years, when I lived in residence, there was this weird dichotomy where living on campus felt more like home because I had been there longer than in my parents' house. But it still seemed weird to call Halifax home, because it was this big crazy city, and all of the thing that I was from, that I felt like made me me, were back in the rural areas and small towns where I spent my childhood.
Then I moved out of residence into my first apartment with some of my best friends, and that was when I really started to feel comfortable in the city and come to accept that this was where I was going to be living for a while, and that that was okay.
These days I consider both places home. I've realized that home isn't just where you come from or where you live now. It's anywhere that makes you feel safe and loved and happy. And since it's possible for that to happen in more than one place, it's possible to have your home in more than one place.
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