I’m sitting in my car watching the bay. It’s a clear day, warm and breezy, the kind summers here are made of. Through the haze and across the water is San Francisco, distant and elusive (to me at least) as ever.

This is where I’m from—this is where I was born and where I spent eighteen years. I had a small life here, quiet and narrow and mostly unambitious. My favorite place was my bedroom, the same one that had always been mine, and I’d spend my weekends there, sitting at my desk next to the open window, writing stories and watching movies and dreaming of the life I knew one day I would have, the life that now, at 22, I’m finally growing into.

I loved my small life, and for those eighteen years it was enough. And when I went home for the holidays during my freshman year of college, it was a haven, a beacon I had counted down the days to see, a protector to stave off the isolation and loneliness and homesickness that had swallowed me whole that first semester.

It’s been a year since I’ve been here and for the first time it feels fully and finally different. Somehow, gradually and quietly over the past four years of holiday breaks and summer visits, the axis of home has shifted, and that once-new place that at 18 felt so foreign and daunting, now feels warm and comfortable and exciting and mine—like home. And this place, the one I longed for when I was away and despaired at having to leave, feels like another life, one I am happy to have left behind.

In these four years I have realized myself. I have realized my ambition and my happiness and the life I want to be living.

This town is like a time capsule, filled with familiar faces and places and the memories of a childhood. And as happy as I am to see my family, I do not want to be here. It feels oppressive, like being dragged backward.

Maybe the break between childhood and adulthood (or personhood since it feels like just that) is too recent, too close to me still, and in time coming back here will fill me only with fondness and nostalgia for what was long ago. As it is now, I can’t wait to drive back down the 5, back to my city, my home, my life.

This might be what growing up feels like—or, at the very least, outgrowing.