The Breakaway Begins

Sometimes leaving home is the first step toward finding yourself.

My decision to go to college surprised everyone in my family.

My father couldn't understand why I wanted to go.

“What do you need college for?” he asked.

My mother was living in a world of her own by then. She thought my future would be better spent finding a wealthy husband than earning a degree. College simply wasn't part of our family's story.

Then my father made me an offer that felt less like encouragement and more like another test. He would help pay for college, but only if I left town and did not attend a local school. At the time, I wondered whether he expected me to fail. Perhaps sending me away was simply another way of pushing me out of his life.

At eighteen, I wasn’t entirely sure what to make of his offer and conditions. My father had never been there for me in the ways I longed for, or in the ways my heart needed. He was absent where a daughter needed tenderness, reassurance, and emotional presence. My trust in him and choices he made for me was shaky at best.

In the end though, I accepted my father's challenge and chose a university seventy-five miles from home, far enough away to leave, but close enough that I could still imagine finding my way back if everything fell apart.

Looking back, I believe he knew I needed more. He recognized that I needed a life larger than the one I came from, and he had the means to make that possible.

He may not have known how to help me discover who I was, but he was there for me in a way I would not understand until much later. Sending me away to college may have been one of the best gifts he ever gave me.

Nothing had prepared me for what waited on campus.

The campus buzzed with confidence. Everyone seemed to know who they were, what to wear, where to go, who to date, what to say in class. There were parties, sororities, football games, crowded dorms, dating, and classrooms full of students who acted as if they had always known where they belonged.

I spent most of my time studying everyone else, the way I had once studied the adults around me while I was growing up. I hoped I could figure out the rules before anyone noticed I didn't know them.

I tried to become whoever I thought I needed to be. I joined a sorority. I accepted invitations. I dated. I smiled on cue.

But inside, I felt like I was wearing someone else's clothes. Confusion was living with me daily.

Every decision seemed enormous. Every choice carried the fear of making the wrong one.

No one had ever taught me how to know myself. In the home where I grew up, survival mattered more than self-discovery. I had learned to adjust to what the adults in my life needed and to keep the quieter parts of myself tucked safely away.

College suddenly asked questions no one had ever asked me before.

What do you enjoy? What do you believe? Who are you?

I wasn't sure I knew the answers.

I enrolled in classes that tugged at my true interests, then quickly dropped them, convinced I wasn't creative enough, smart enough, or talented enough to succeed.

Every assignment felt like an invitation to reveal something about myself. Somewhere inside me lived a girl who desperately wanted to create, but she had learned long ago that being seen wasn't always safe.

So, I pulled back.

I thought there was something wrong with me.

Everyone else seemed excited by the freedom to explore a world away from home. I often felt exhausted by it. Crowded rooms drained me. Solitude restored me, though I could not yet explain why.

Then, little by little, almost without realizing it, I began making choices that felt closer to my own heart. I left the sorority. I changed roommates. I enrolled in psychology and philosophy classes because they stirred questions that would not leave me alone.

No one in my family had ever walked this road. They rarely asked about my new life, and I did not know how to explain it to them. Whatever was happening inside me belonged almost entirely to me.

It was not the first time I had been left to become my own guide. But this time, I was beginning to choose the direction.

Looking back now, I don't think college changed who I was. It gave a hesitant young woman enough space to begin hearing her own voice and enough room to wonder what God had planted within her.

I had not found myself yet. But I had stepped through the door God opened, and I was taking a few uncertain steps in a direction I had chosen for myself.

The breakaway had begun.