This Friday, I pack up boxes and bookcases and cats into a rented U-Haul truck and drive 700 miles to start a new life – in my old home town.

In the four years since I called Chicago my home, I have changed. I finally have the 5+ years of experience employers are seeking. I also have a Master’s degree and a few more bruises on my tiny pink heart.

Back in Chicago, my friends have been engaged and married, bought homes, brought home puppies. My sister has had a baby, my punk brother enrolled in law school, my mother retired.

Everything has changed, but I’m still afraid you can’t start over in the place where you began.

I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, but have only spent one year there in the time between leaving for college and this new adventure back into the depths of the Midwest. In the eight years I’ve spent away, I’ve shared brief information about my life like Twitter status’ with my friends and family:

“Will be home for Christmas on the 19^th.”

“Bought a new bike”

“Am going through a rough time.”

Distance lets you share things in pieces, just snapshots of real events and emotions. Distance lets you process and choose your words before you react. It lets you exist via email, text and biannual visits. It lets you sculpt how people see you.

While gaining proximity to your loved ones is the obvious plus, can you really be a new you when you move home?

Sometimes, at cocktail parties, the new person you are chatting up drops their eyes and swirls their drink when they utter the phrase, “I moved around a lot as a kid.” It may have been a parent’s job, or lack there of. It may have been custody battles or the military. It could have been anything. I think there’s a general sympathy for people who lived in 17 homes or 8 states before they got to high school or college. We feel like they must have missed out on something – the same friends returning each year from summer, the memories that gather in basements and backyards of your childhood home.

I’ve always wondered if there is some sympathy deserved for the other side – the kid, like me, who never moved. The home in which I slept the first nights of my life is the home in which my mother still resides. Of course, there was something nice about never moving, having some friends I’ve known since I was too little to cross the street, but there is something very stifling about spending those eighteen years in one place. Others’ expectations of who you are and who you should be change slowly. I was always scared to do anything unexpected. You have to wait until college to start recreating yourself, crafting a new you to live in your new life. When finally you do, you might run into old friends around Thanksgiving and share the details of who you have become – short hair, pierced nose, smoking cigarettes, long broken up with the high school sweetheart. You share who you are, but when you leave to go back to college, back to your new city, back to the apartment you chose and decorated, you take the new you with you.

This is all in the fine print of that “Moving Home” deal I signed. And I’m afraid. What if ten years after I left the old me behind, she’s waiting for me when I get back?