In high school I used to wonder why life seemed to be set up as a series of partings. It occurred to me that you go through high school, becoming attached to your circle of friends, only to find yourself at graduation realizing that the circle is about to be broken. Obviously there is no way you can control it ... friends will go their own ways to lead their own lives. I chose to go to Berkeley partly because it meant not going far from home, not being faced with being completely separated from the world I knew.

College presents a similar cycle of acquaintance followed by ultimate separation. For me, the hesitation of releasing my old friends and moving on with new ones made my freshman year fairly awkward. After finding my niche, my life progressed and all was well. I spent three years with the same two roommates and look back on it fondly. Again the cycle came to its close, and still being fearful of significant change, I chose to remain in the Bay Area for grad school.

The story becomes eerily familiar at this point: new friends competing with my reluctance to release my old ones, slowing my personal growth to a near standstill. I worked in the same lab for five years, and now I think of them as my second family. But my feelings of being an outsider (however self-imposed) didn't subside until my third year there.

Now I'm in Boston, at last accepting that perhaps the world beyond the Bay may have something to teach me. But again, I'm clinging to the friends I've left elsewhere, and not immersing myself in what is in front of me. At this rate, by my next job I'll have lost touch with all the old friends and will be locked away in my memories.

No matter where I go, I can't leave home.