After visiting my parents’ new home, it became clear to me that, aside from my 1996 Honda Accord, I am homeless.

I am aware college is a time of transitions: leaving home, learning new things, working toward a career and feeling at home changes frequently. It is simply part of the growing process.

I have met many great people at Eastern. I felt at home freshman year in Carman Hall and feel I have had a home last year and presently at my apartment, but things sometimes get confusing.

Although I primarily live at school, I have always considered Tinley Park my true home.

I am used to living in a town where I see five people from my past around every corner. It is typically a comforting experience, but that is beginning to change.

Last weekend I experienced my new home, a highrise on the Gold Coast of downtown Chicago.

Being greeted by Jimmy the doorman, instead of my mother racing down the driveway, isn’t too traumatic but is still a hard adjustment and a rude awakening.

Although at times in Tinley it is annoying there is nothing to do and the entire neighborhood knows everything about you, there is a comfort to it.

No one knows me better than my friends who have “cruised the 1-5-9,” which consisted of a group of us packing in my Honda to blast music and drive down 159th Street; hung out in the White Castle parking lot or got all decked out for cosmic bowling.

My best friend and I have lived at each other’s houses morning, noon and night throughout grade school, separated by only one block. And although both us currently live at our respective universities, my sister and I have always had “home” in the same house.

With this move, I feel the only “home” or reliable tie to the past is my car. Housing at school changes too frequently to be a home and it’s hard to call a place I can only find because of it’s relation to a mall, “home” just yet.

All of this had brought me to the realization that growing up is not just attending college, but creating your own life, as exciting and scary as that may be.

When I started my freshman year, I thought being away from home meant independence. When I moved into my first apartment sophomore year, I thought ‘No, this is independence,’ but now that my parents have moved out of the home I grew up in, I think I never really knew independence until now.

Independence is not just the miles away from your hometown, it’s paying the bills on time, preparing resumes, going on interviews, doing what you want to do. Independence is all-encompassing, it’s living your own life.

It’s hard to make the transition from childhood to adulthood, but interestingly enough, you develop new families as well, friends which become the family you choose for yourself.

Though things and places in your life may change and shuffle around every turn, home is where you make it. It’s the people that surround you that make it “home.”