coming home

These days have been wonderful. Coming home to a pantry full of food, asking my mom if she has this ingredient for baking and finding it always available, sleeping in mold-free rooms, strolling along La Jolla Shores with my family, making spontaneous road trips to Irvine just to get 85C bread, and waking up at comfortable hours and making my mornings as long as possible (I count mornings as the time before I do anything that requires work).

Yes, being at home in San Diego has been quite the treat. But my point in writing today isn’t about telling the world how luxurious my break has been (though I love it), but to examine something that I’ve noticed after years of coming back home that could be a personal thing or a shared thing.

There’s an aspect of coming home that’s double sided. Whenever I come home I experience a constancy and slowness that I extremely appreciate that is very hard to find in college life. However, my brother and I were talking about this the other night, and we found that the comfort that comes from this constancy lasts about a couple days to a week. Then the coin starts to flip.

There’s a point where constancy starts to look more like stagnancy. I’ve experienced these hints of stagnancy when I feel that I am still treated like the Sarah Lee people knew four years ago. When I’m put into group environments and I people act as if we never left, as if they’re ignoring the many stories added to who I am today. Is this just a cry to everyone saying, “Look at the real me”? Maybe. But I’m hoping what speaks out the most in the post is not a pointing of fingers. Besides, the fingers point to me as well. What I mean is that I play a part in this whole coming home deal. I realized that part of coming back to old relationships is patience, and understanding that there is no way others at home could fully understand my experiences.

But I want to continue to emphasize a need that I have to keep in mind as well…the need to simply listen, and to hear people out, and to not assume that one knows everything, their tendiencies, their flaws, their strengths, and at least come to a better understanding after listening. The environment I seem to come back to is set with traditions and often times those traditions, going back and doing things like we always do, doesn’t create the best environment for hearing people out, and knowing who people are today.

This will serve to be a reminder for me, to look at people even I think will never change, and to see them as dynamic, and multifaceted people, who are more than I have known them to be.