There’s no place like home

I came to college with a major inferiority complex. It seemed like everyone I met wasn’t… I came to college with a major inferiority complex. It seemed like everyone I met wasn’t just smarter than me — they had lived more.

I remember meeting a girl at Pitt Start whose parents had been in the U.S. Foreign Service. She had grown up in more countries than states I had visited and could speak four languages fluently. So when the conversation spun around to how I had grown up, it almost felt embarrassing to report that I had indeed just moved out of the house I had come home to the day after I was born and that I still had a pretty shaky handle on the English language, let alone Farsi.

The more ideas and concepts I was introduced to in class and conversations with others, the more I became determined to make up for lost time. I was going to see and do everything for myself. After all, as St. Augustine is frequently attributed on spring break advertisements for Cancun “the world is a book and those who don’t travel read only a page.” I decided to hatch a secret plan in my head to live on every continent at some point in my life and truly drink from the great reservoir of experience.

When I pictured my ideal future, I wavered back and forth between being a distinguished and cultured diplomat and an unkempt wayward traveler, making my wages in everything from herding goats to tending pubs, any task that enabled me to continue my explorations.

I was lucky enough during my University days to be able to indeed get a good start on experiencing what life was like in cultures rampantly different from my own. What I experienced did indeed change my life. But not in the way I expected.

I no longer have an itchy sense of wanderlust permeate me when a quiet evening at home descends, and I no longer peruse biographies of Lonely Planet contributors for inspiration. This isn’t to say that I don’t love to travel and don’t plan to in the future.

What I have experienced, however, has opened my eyes to all the things I have ever taken for granted. Like growing up in a town where people were still truly interested in how I’m doing, because they had been there since I was born. Or coming home during the holidays to the same bedroom where my parents kept track of how tall I was getting. Or having the same best friends since kindergarten.

No matter where I have been in the world, I have found myself overwhelmed with emotion at the sight of a faded Pirates T-shirt and perusing the online edition of the Herald Standard in whatever dingy internet caf