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I had never felt so lonely in my life.

I had just turned 18 a few days before. A freshman in college, I had just been home for the Thanksgiving break. It was a good break. It was good to be home with my family and to see my best friends from high school after several months. 

It was the Monday after Thanksgiving and I wasn’t ready to return to school, yet. If ever. I didn’t know if I wanted to be in school at all.

So, returning to college wasn’t anything I wanted to be doing that day. But there I was, on a bus jammed with others returning to college or to home from the long holiday weekend. 

A raging snowstorm swirled outside the overheated bus. The normally four-hour trip took at least 10 hours. It seemed like 20. The roads were slippery; traffic was moving slowly, cautiously. We stopped to pick up more people in every possible town along the way, or so it felt like it. 

I was also traveling with two high school friends who were students at the same university. None of us was too excited about returning by bus. We were supposed to travel by car together, with two of our mothers driving and accompanying us. But because of the snowstorm, our mothers were understandably reluctant to risk driving in it. I understood their reluctance. But I didn’t like it. 

After the grueling trip to the university town’s bus station, we gathered our luggage and proceeded to trudge the mile or more through town and through the still falling snow to our separate dorm buildings. 

I, of course, had a huge suitcase to lug, since it was filled with clean laundry I had brought home to wash over the break. I instantly regretted the volume of laundry I brought home, not expecting I'd need to carry it so far on my return to school. I was freezing, tired, irritable, and homesick. It was dark and windy. And, I’ll reiterate, feeling lonelier than I had ever felt before. My arms ached from carrying the suitcase. I was wet from the falling snow, and I desperately wanted to be back at home, in the warmth and familiar embrace of my pre-college life and my family. 

When I got to my dorm room, the hall was eerily quiet. Because of the snow, many of the guys in my hall - including my roommate - weren’t returning that night. That was fine with me; I was in no mood to see or talk with anyone that night, anyway. So I unpacked my mountain of clothes and immediately went to bed.

I sobbed myself to sleep. 

I don’t cry very easily. So, that was a memorable moment in my life. I had been an adult, officially, for just one week, and I hated it right then. If this was what being an adult felt like, I didn't want anything to do with it. 

That horrid day and lonely, depressing night precipitated a turning point for me. I knew that something needed to change. If it didn't, I didn't know if I’d get through the next month with my first experience of college semester finals. I wanted the Christmas break to be here already. I knew that something had to change.

You see, during that first semester of college, I didn't ever consider the university to be part of what home meant to me. I felt if I liked school too much I was being disloyal to the home where I grew up and my life before I left for college. So, that first semester, I spent most of my free time with my two high school friends and didn’t make much effort to make any new friends at school. 

During my senior year of high school, I had a pretty great year. I wasn’t ready to move on from that. I had easily been accepted to a college fairly early. I set a school cross country record that still stands today (because the course was retired not too long after I graduated) and was awarded the team’s most valuable runner trophy that year. I excelled at track. I stole the show in our senior class play and had a fun part in the school musical. I had some great friends and casually dated some very nice girls. My best friend had invited me to travel to Europe with him right after graduation, on a youth band tour to five different countries, in which we had plenty of free time to explore London, Paris, Vienna, and beautiful smaller towns and the Alps in Germany and Switzerland. It was a glorious trip, a magical end to my high school life.

I was still clinging to that life at Thanksgiving through my first semester of college. I didn’t yet want to move on to start a new chapter as a young adult.

That reluctance was to my detriment. 

After that sad, lonely day and night that ended in sobbing myself to sleep, I began to realize that I needed to create a home at college. I was going to be living there for the next three-and-a-half years. I needed to make it my home away from the home I grew up in - or I wasn't going to succeed and make it through college. I needed to branch out to make new friends and have new experiences and explore the possibilities that the privilege of going to college had - and was meant - to offer. 

I needed to realize that by branching out I wasn't being disloyal to my childhood home and the people who loved and nurtured me there. I needed to understand and see that the university and all that it had to offer would enlighten me, expand my knowledge and perspectives, deepen my relationships. It is the relationships that are what actually and most importantly make a home. It is the human connections and shared experiences that teach us, empower us, nurture us in ever greater ways to live lives of joy, relational and emotional abundance, gratitude, wonder, and love. 

Once I realized, accepted, and embraced that perspective - that truth - I began to feel more and more at home. And in that process, I didn't need to reject or diminish the people and home of my childhood, my most formative years. 

Home is not simply a place. It is an attitude, a feeling of being safe, an atmosphere of wanting to grow and explore a larger world that can delight  and fulfill us. 

Since then, I’ve never sobbed like I did that long ago, alone in my college dorm room. That night inspired a change that I deeply needed.

I knew that if I wanted to feel at home, to be at home, I needed to seek the relationships that would bring me safety, delight, and love for this life and my place in it. And you know what? Today, I live with one of those people I found in college. She was the young woman I met who lived on the floor below mine at college, and today is the wonderful mother of my three sons, the grandmother of my five grandchildren, and the perfect friend whom I needed to create with me a home for the rest of my life.