When you think of someone living a double life, no doubt thoughts of someone engaging in an extra-marital affair pops into your head. Or perhaps your mind dwells on victims of Bipolar Disorder or maybe you associate convicts running from the law and living under a false identity with living a double life.

I’ve never experienced anything remotely like the aforementioned, but I do feel like I live somewhat of a double life, being more than 200 miles away from my childhood home. After beginning college in the fall of 2000, I initially thought maybe this double life feeling was just a phase that would pass after a mere month. However, I was startled to realize one year after enrolling in college, I still felt like I was living two separate lives — one at my home and one here at Eastern.

After surveying my friends from my home up north in the western Chicago suburbs though, I discovered all of my friends who had gone away to college were all experiencing relatively similar feelings. After venturing home for their first holiday and every subsequent one thereafter, my friends and acquaintances continuously said they could not shake the feeling that they were revisiting a previous time in their lives.

From my experiences, there really seems to be no way around that eerie feeling of nostalgia that seems to invade you when you go home for even a non-extended period of time.

For the grand majority of you students, the place you call home on holidays is where you went to high school, attended those goofy slumber parties growing up and formed concrete air-tight friendships. This is the place where plenty of things near and dear to your heart exist.

Although it is quite fulfilling to have friends in two different towns, the feelings associated with each town vary. You may have problems you’re facing in your hometown, but at Eastern you may feel less troubled because you are out of touch with those problems, or vice-versa. Therefore, they are “out of sight, out of mind,” as the cliche goes.

Some of my colleagues and friends here at Eastern defined the whole double-life scenario as having distinctly different emotions at both your college place of living, and home, as well as having different roles at each place.

When you’re at Eastern, you’re whole focus is here with your friends and your course work. When you scramble home though, all of your responsibilities and difficulties there suddenly stream back to you.

Living a double life in college may be something that most everyone gradually becomes accustomed to, and the feelings associated with it may seem simultaneously like obvious and familiar feelings that are inevitable when you are a college student. But I never really realized how prevalent the double life feelings were among students. Last time I checked, it wasn’t a hot topic among students at the local fast food joints.

But if you have ever been astonished to hear your friends’ responses if you have ever asked them, ‘hey, this may sound really strange and unorthodox, but do you feel like you are living two separate lives — one at college and one at home?’

They probably would shockingly respond, ‘omigosh you feel that way too.’ Although nothing may quell your confusion about living lives in two different towns, at least it challenges you by making you juggle a few more things than we were used to in high school. However, the promise I encourage you to make to yourself is, when you arrive home for holiday break, just remember to put your problems and worries associated with college aside. You deserve that much.