Welcome to The Blair D.C. Project, Blair Guilfoile's weekly blog about her experience being a fall intern for BRAVO!. We love our intern blogs and hope you enjoy following Blair!
Weeks 12 & 13
November 16 - November 27, 2015
This blog post is going to be a bit different than my previous DC posts. Namely because I spent most of my week traveling for the Thanksgiving holiday! My travel plans were a bit of a whirlwind. The first leg of the trip I flew back to the Bay Area in northern California. Although my parents moved from California to Texas this past summer, my family decided we would crash our good family friend’s dinner and spend a few days in our old town. Then, 48 hours after first arriving in the Bay, I was on a plane again and headed to Fort Worth, where I stood with my TCU friends in the cold, pouring rain and watched our football team beat our rival Baylor (#gofrogs). I ended my trip by driving back to Dallas to spend my last night of the Thanksgiving weekend watching football with my parents all night.
Leading up to the break, people would ask about my plans for the holiday. I found myself giving them way more detail than they probably cared to know by giving them the full rundown of my travel itinerary. I probably could have simply said I was going home. But for some reason, I couldn’t bring myself to give the simple answer. I guess because the word “home” doesn’t have a simple definition for me anymore. It hasn’t for a long time. What was home? Over the past few years the answer has changed a lot. When at TCU, I still will say California is home, even though I don’t live there anymore. I also catch myself referring to my parent’s apartment in Dallas as home, even though I haven’t ever lived there. In DC, people will ask me where I am from and it’s always a toss-up between answering Texas or California, (sometimes I throw in Michigan too depending on my mood.) I also caught myself the other day texting my DC roommate, “I’ll be home in 10 minutes.”
If anything, these last few weeks in DC have taught me that home is less of a physical place and more like a feeling or idea. It’s a place of comfort. It’s a place of retreat. It’s the place you go to be with the people you love the most. It’s the place where you feel love the most. That’s what I enjoy most about the holiday season. If you are lucky, you get to go home for the holidays. If you are really lucky, you come to the realization that home is not a place of origin, but a place of love.