I can’t believe college has officially started for me this week! Sometimes, I feel like the summer flew by, and other times, I feel like the summer seemed to go really slowly. It may be because there were weeks I was really busy, causing time to go faster, and there were weeks I was not as busy, making time drag on forever. Either way, my summer is officially over.

So you may or may not know that I moved into an apartment this year. (If you didn’t know, well now you do). My roommate and I only moved in on Thursday of this past week, and it already feels like home to me. I started thinking why that might be, and I came upon a realization.

Home is a feeling.

Home is not a place or a person. Yes, it can be both of those things, but it is so much more. Home is where you feel the most comfortable to be yourself, where you may not have to be on your best behavior all the time.

They say “Home is where the heart is”, but I disagree. My heart is in a lot of places. My heart is in a little church in Chalco, outside of Mexico City, where I got to work with some amazing people of all ages. My heart is in a park in Philadelphia, where the way I pray was radically changed forever. My heart is all over Boston, where I walked 10+ miles a day and learned so much. My heart is in Wrigley Field, Lucas Oil Stadium, and Banker’s Life Fieldhouse, where my favorite teams play. My heart is all across Indianapolis, in places like the Indiana State Museum where I’ve invested a lot of time. My heart is anywhere my friends and family are, because those people mean the world to me.

But are all those places my home? No. I got sick in Mexico and missed a whole day of stuff because I was sleeping off a fever. Philadelphia was a little scary at times. Not all of these places have felt like home to me, and that’s okay.

However, my apartment DOES feel like home. Obviously, it’s my physical home for the next nine months, but it is mentally my home as well. It is where I can go at the end of my classes, where I can rest and recharge. On Sunday, my roommate and I had friends over for lunch and just to see them. I loved having them here, and they add to the feeling of home.

I think when people move into an apartment or a house with a roommate, they expect to do almost everything together. That’s not the case for my roommate and I. Yes, we do some things together, but we also have time apart. We spent a lot of the weekend on different floors of our apartment. She was upstairs in her room doing her own thing, and I was downstairs on the couch doing my own thing. That’s how we work. With my work schedule, I don’t eat dinner until after 9 half the week. I don’t expect my roommate to wait until then to eat dinner. She knows she’s not required to eat dinner with me, and that’s fine.

Home may not be where the heart is, but home is what you create it to be. It could be a 2-bedroom apartment where yours doesn’t have air conditioning. It could be a person that you actually feel safe letting your guard down when you’re with them. It could be any and all of these things. But above all, home is where and what you make it to be. So I encourage you to find your home. Or if you aren’t finding anything that feels like home, then work on making one. Everybody may not have a house, but everybody should have a home.

Let me know if you have any thoughts or comments!
Love,
Kim ♥

P.S. Here is the picture of our living room/kitchen, because I love it!