Two Years Later...

"You know the great thing, though, is that change can be so constant you don't even feel the difference until there is one. It can be so slow that you don't even notice that your life is better or worse, until it is. Or it can just blow you away; make you something different in an instant."


- Life as a House

One of the greatest things about coming home from college is the comfort and familiarity of home sweet home. It is the memories that flood every single road, store, restaurant, random field, or broken old swing by the lake. But along with the familiarity comes the realization that none of us are who we used to be. 

From the day we are all born we begin to change. We don't realize it because these changes are just part of growing up. But once we go off to college and come back to reunite with all of our old friends, we begin to notice these small differences. We look back upon relationships that have ended. The high school sweethearts that we were so sure were soulmates no longer speak to each other. The most talented athletes haven't touched a ball since we graduated. The smartest kids are failing class and barely getting by. The innocent ones are into some of the worst things. Everyone is different.

Some change for the better and some change for the worse, but everyone has changed. It's not that things have changed. It's that people have changed, in turn making things different. The hardest part is not looking upon these changes and becoming sad. I've had to learn to look at these changes as part of the inevitable, appreciate the memories, and to just let go. There's no going back, so we have to keep moving forward, accepting the very changes that we never saw coming.

"We have to keep reinventing ourselves almost every minute because the world can change in an instant, and there's no time for looking back. Sometimes the changes are forced on us, sometimes they happen by accident, and we make the most of them. We have to constantly come up with new ways to fix ourselves. So we change, we adapt, we create new versions of ourselves. We just need to be sure that this one is an improvement over the last."

—Grey’s Anatomy

"Nothing stays the same. You grow up, make friends, lose friends, go to college, lose track of people, meet new ones, and sometimes you ask yourself why. But all I can tell you is that every single experience you go through like this changed you in some way. Every new person who comes into your life changes you. Every moral dilemma or emotional experience you come up against changes you. It's your job to decide how. That's how character is developed."