Building a Home in a Temporary Place

It took me until second semester to realise the true nature of university, of the life that it brings with itself and its unique challenges and opportunities. More significantly, it took me until second semester to realise that I was approaching university in the wrong way: never really settling down, never getting established, never recognising the permanence; only the transience. 

I spent the first twelve years of my life in Central Asia, where my parents lived and worked and built a life. I loved it there; loved it with all the heart of a happy child in a happy home, with friends, fall-outs, laughter and tears. When we moved to England for the first time, it felt like my world had been burnt to the ground—in a moment, my home, my friends, my pets and everything that had made me so happy had disappeared, and I had to settle down in a new place. 

It took me years to come to the point of being able to address that heartache. The first two years were a kind of nightmare for me, and the many that followed were only really the beginning of healing—a chink letting in a single ray of sunlight. But the sunlight began to enter and I began to heal. 

Yet what remained was still a lot of scar tissue and hurt, a tangled mess of identity and fear and longing—deep longing for what I had lost and what I subconsciously believed I wouldn’t be able to find again. Sixth form was a great time for me - not easy, by any means - but one which allowed me to start putting down some roots, if only for a two year stint. 

University however? A whole new thing. Much harder than I thought it would be—to move away from my family who had always been home to me, and to try and build a life somewhere temporary. In second year I was planning on a year abroad to Moscow. In my head university was not only transient in its four-year nature but in the knowledge that within a year I’d have to rebuild the life that I had begun to establish. 

That wasn’t to say that I didn’t get stuck in. I liked to stay busy and so I did. Kickboxing. Contemporary dance classes. The Christian Union. A church. Flatmates. Decorating my room a little. Figuring out how to cook. Going on nights out. As TCKs we are used to getting involved very early—we know that adapting to a new culture requires total immersion and participation. We know that in any new place there is a period of adjustment, with stages of euphoria right through to depression being clearly outlined on a neat graph in our minds. 

I knew all that and yet I still viewed university as a temporary thing. Three weeks in, I went home to celebrate my birthday weekend with my family. Four weeks after that was another visit. Five weeks after was the blessed end of term and a five week ‘going back to normal’ period. I saw my friends. I hung out with my family. I played with our two cats. I baked for Christmas as I had done for years and years and years.

There were cracks in that idea, though. One of my friends, who had gone to London to study psychology, told me she wasn’t going to come back to my city for more than a few days. I was heartbroken as my plans of us spending weeks together just as we used to evaporated in the wind. I saw my college friends and experienced an unpleasant shock to see how some of them had changed—growing and developing at university or in their gap years. When my mum assumed that I’d be paying for my own haircut rather than her covering the cost, I actually cried. It was not the ten or fifteen pound bill. (Although yes, I was a student on a budget after all.) It was the sudden realisation that everything had changed, and that a chapter which had been so very happy to me had been closed. 

It also wasn’t the case that university was just some summer camp that I spent three weeks at only to return home as the same person. University meant that I had stepped through the archway into a kind of semi-adulthood, of semi-responsibility and choices which had real consequences. Returning home was meant to be the temporary part, a nice holiday with the family I adored. I struggled and struggled with this idea for a long time—not consciously but under the surface like churning waters deep at the bottom of a river. I didn’t want to accept the change, I didn’t want to let go of family stability, I didn’t know how to build a home somewhere all on my own.

Second term was hard in more ways than one. Family crises combined with an extremely busy Christmas period and I wasn’t at home or able to help. But four weeks in, walking back in the frigid cold with my kickboxing partner, my mind skipped back to the holidays and what they had revealed to me. 

I had been treating university as something far more temporary than it actually was.

Despite all the involvement and participation and busyness that would seem to anyone else that I was settling in and putting down roots, I had clutched those roots closely to my chest. It was a sort of defiant move that allowed me to tell myself that since I was moving on in a year there would be no need to build any kind of life that could lead to heartbreak. 

Slowly, I began to speak to that defiance.

University is an unfinished chapter in my life. Yes, there is something about it which is temporary. Every chapter has an end after all. But learning to live life to the fullest, not just on the surface but from deep within, is vital in every red-inked paragraph and page. My home is beginning to move with me instead of being left behind in the land of nostalgia and reminiscence. 

I will continue to build it wherever I go—little shacks erected here and there, dotted all over the world, with corrugated iron roofs and wooden walls. So far the largest of them still stands in Central Asia, unmoved by the summer winds blown across the Caspian Sea. One lies in England, in the city my parents live in. But one is being built here, in my university flat with three other brilliant and unique people. Having so many little “bases” is not a weakness but a strength.

It just means that I can find a home wherever I go.

Edited by Eisha Gupta.