Welcome home

That single line of blue and grey text on my Facebook profile has been bothering me of late. It sits just below the unaccountably past-tense “Studied at Princeton University” and my “work information” describing a seemingly ancient summer internship. Next to a cute little gray house icon it has four simple words: “Lives in Littleton, Colorado.”

I don’t actually. It’s a matter of legal record — I am no longer required to perform jury duty because I signed an indelibly official form affirming I will not be in Arapahoe County, Colo. for any 30-day period within the next year. I’ll be home for a whole week this summer, maybe fall break, Thanksgiving and winter break, but none of these really justify saying I “live” in Littleton.

But Princeton doesn’t feel like home either. While my classmates updated their “current location” in September, it seemed like too big of a step for me, so I let it be, maintaining digital status quo while placing myself squarely between two worlds. I may say “I’m going home” when I mean “I’m going back to the 100-square-foot cinderblock cell that houses my bed,” or jokingly (as I did four weeks ago) refer to Icahn labs as a group home for Integrated Science students, but there’s something ever so slightly off about calling anywhere in New Jersey home.

It is strange to me. The humidity. The cicadas. The fireflies — they glow in the dark, man! Lea Trusty and Shruthi Deivasigamani have both recently written columns contrasting the culture of their small towns with that of the suburban-collegiate New Jersey that we inhabit, and the regional differences they speak to are true. Life here is more fast-paced, and nodding and saying “good afternoon” to strangers on the street gets left by the wayside. Exacerbating the collective cold shoulder that the East gives me, the high-powered social-climbing ambiance of Princeton leaves me flailing even as my peers appear to embrace and thrive on the frantic ladder to success. But, though it is largely the people who make Princeton feel strange now, when I do begin to call New Jersey home, it will be because of these very same people.

I was shocked during my first week of classes how adaptable humans are to new environments. Having lived nearly my entire life in the same house, I managed to figure out a schedule whereby I would not only get to class on time, but also eat, clean myself and (usually) my clothes and get a reasonable amount of sleep. I did this at the same time as more than a thousand of my classmates, from all walks of life, each adapting to dorm living as if it were second nature. Princeton didn’t feel like home, but it was at least a survivable waypoint.

Academic and physiological necessities were easy (or at least quick) — social adaptation has proven to be a considerably longer process. Perhaps my discomfort at calling Princeton home stemmed from my aforementioned discomfort with the people here, or simply from the fact that I was never one to make friends on short acquaintance. In any event, while I still wouldn’t call this place home, I have begun, over the last semester, to feel glimmers of something homelike.

When we ISCers share in the thrill of getting C. elegans to do what we want, Lewis Thomas Laboratories’ teaching lab is home. When I sip tea among free cookies and conversation with my friends from the band, Murray-Dodge basement is home. When I write this to the yelling of my ’zee group as we bake lava cake, my RGS’s room is home. When I nod to fellow early-morning runners on the towpath, on Shapiro Walk, passing over Streicker Bridge, home is, well, wherever the hell we happen to be. In each of these, I feel the echoes of high school, of home cooking, of chatting with fellow hikers in Colorado’s mountains. So here I begin to make my home again.

Home is adaptable. It’s not something I can simply carry with me, but it’s something that can take root anywhere, given enough time and immersion, given a chance to make friends. Even when I’m not moving, home is changing — as the Class of 2013 leaves and the Class of 2017 enters, my home here will briefly seem strange again, but only until I re-adapt. With luck, by the end of my long life, there will be many places I call home, each one intimately familiar, each one totally different, as I find myself among people I love wherever I go.

Never again will I have a home like the one I knew in Littleton — and, when I leave Princeton after three more short years, I will be leaving yet another unique home. But like friends, I can make new homes and keep the old; years down the road upon returning to Princeton for Reunions, or to Littleton for Thanksgiving, it will feel perfectly natural to hear from family and old friends alike the words that comfort every heart — "welcome home."

Bennett McIntosh is a freshman from Littleton, Colorado. He can be reached at bam2@princeton.edu.