*Disclaimer: This is in no way a brag or to be seen as ungrateful

Picture this, the opening scene: a camera pans out to reveal a young college girl packing up her dorm while listening to her newest Spotify album, “~senti~.” Frazzled and disheveled, she attempts to shove her life into three suitcases that she’ll be toting around all summer.

Well, that was me two weeks ago, contemplating how I won’t have a stable home base until I graduate college. For 10 months, I’ve stationed myself in a shoebox of a dorm room, plastering my walls with posters, pictures, and letters in an attempt to make it feel like home. Now, my walls are bare and I’m off for the summer. I’ll have a few weeks at home, a few weeks abroad, and a few weeks working. I’m not sure how I’m ever supposed to settle, but I guess that is the beauty of a college student’s life.

I tend to contemplate my life when I fly…summer is going to be full of both. I run through my life and favorite memories from the past semester like a movie reel to the tune of Post Malone’s new album with a few Cardi B and Bazzi tracks sprinkled in: my best friends causing a raucous in the library, watching a movie with the boy down the hall with a stomach full of butterflies, and one frat party blurring into another every time White Tiger or The Middle comes on shuffle.

I also think about the future—what life is going to be like in each new destination, what I will do without my mom or my best friends, what I’ll wear to my fancy new retail job, and how to not think about my anxiety that is slowly consuming my body.

My best friends are jetting off across the Atlantic, traveling every weekend to a new European wonderland. They are the ones who will truly be living the life of a nomad. One is headed to Berlin in two days. Recently, she proclaimed that her life is “in shambles” because she is and will continue to live out of a suitcase for the rest of the summer. But then again, she’s about to embark on her best adventure yet. I imagine her strolling down a quaint cobblestone road, window shopping and impressing the locals with her impeccable grammar cultivated over years of taking high school German. I picture her taking a deep breath and remembering how brave and independent she is as she boards a train, traveling alone to another foreign country like a boss.

I think the best way to look at the instability in our lives is thinking of it as a gift; it’s a lesson in an unforgiving course called “the real world.” The inexistence of a concrete home during college teaches one to find comfort and a “home” within oneself. My mom always says this is one of the greatest lessons one can learn. We have very few opportunities to spend an entire summer completely unattached to one place, we may as well take advantage of it. With no job or consistent home, we roam.

A nomad is defined as a person or group of people without a designated home who roam around in search of food and pasture. My next meal will be home-cooked in Phoenix, Arizona, and a month from now, I’ll be cooking my own meals in Nantucket (but I, unfortunately, have no cooking skills).

While it’s scary, it’s also exciting. I’ve never felt so independent in my life—I feel like my life is finally my own. My suitcases are filled to the brim. I’m ready to go. This is the life of a nomad…the summer life of a modern, young, and embarrassingly eager college student.

By Arden Schraff

Duke Student, mental health activist and resident goddess making Insta casual.

Life As a Nomad

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