In school and sixth form, I was very open about how I identified. My sexuality was a central part of my personality because it was something that was different. I was surrounded by people who didn’t identify as part of the LGBTQ+ community, and so being queer was a part of my personality. But as I moved away to Cambridge, and to Murray Edwards specifically, I found that being queer wasn’t different. I found myself surrounded by queer people, all of whom had different experiences to me, who struggled more or less with their sexuality. At home, I had never felt the need to question the label I chose at fifteen, but moving to university prompted me to think in a much more nuanced fashion about my identity. So, needless to say, coming home holds mixed emotions.

I feel lucky that I genuinely love being at home. I get on with my family, I have great friends and my “childhood room” really doesn’t feel frozen in a time before I moved out. But transitioning from the intensity of a Cambridge term, when I feel challenged (academically and emotionally) to think more about who I am and what I want to do, to being at home, is difficult. At home people who met me years ago still remember me as the sixteen-year-old who proclaimed her bisexuality loud and proud, rather than who I am now; a queer woman who has moved away from the rather reductive labels of ‘gay’, ‘straight’ and ‘bi’.

“Years of friendships, love affairs and sorrow are kept in my childhood bedroom, and they are just as much me as whatever I get up to in Cambridge.”

So I’ve been trying to bring the Cambridge Neve back home, with mixed results. The first step was having pictures of Cambridge in my room. In any normal year, we’d spend most of our year away from our parents’ homes, in college housing, basically living independently. To come home, a place I know I’m lucky to have, means to become dependent on my family again. I have to orient my mealtimes around others, vacate certain rooms when someone else needs them and sometimes stay in to look after my little sister when everyone else is out. I’ve tried to remind myself what life looks like when I don’t depend on these things, and the result is a pinboard full of pictures of all of the ridiculous things me and my friends got up to in the last two years. That freedom was new to me, as it is to most of us when we move away, and bringing it home is hard, especially when a lot of my home friends haven’t gone to university.

I like my bedroom to feel like mine, and to remind me that home is not all there is. I have photos from university, my books, work, and the most recent addition: a pride flag. Living with queer people meant that June was a big month, and a few of us invested in the pride flags we felt we were overdue last term. They decorated our communal space, alongside some homemade paper chains and a rather chaotic whiteboard, but when the end of term came I realised the pride flag would be coming home with me. I’ve never felt the need to “come out” to my parents (although if they’re reading this, I guess this is the moment), and I’ve never questioned that they’d accept me for who I am, but there’s definitely a difference between quietly being queer and having a pride flag on the end of your clothes rail. And in all honesty, it feels like it’s meant to be there. My home bedroom has never really been static, but it has sometimes felt in need of a refresh, like it doesn’t reflect me properly. Recently I’ve felt more at home in those four walls than anywhere else, and that’s because coming home no longer feels like returning to someone I’m not. My university bedrooms have been reflections of me in a specific moment, whereas my bedroom at home is a culmination of everyone I’ve ever been; there are cuddly toys from when I was a child, clothes from many different phases and pictures drawn by friends I don’t have anymore. These things played a part in making me who I am, and I’ve come to realise that home doesn’t feel like an arena for interrogating who I am, because it’s all laid out in front of me. Years of friendships, love affairs and sorrow are kept in my childhood bedroom, and they are just as much me as whatever I get up to in Cambridge.

Cambridge has made me question who I am and how I identify, and it can feel that the growth I do in term time is negated when I come home, but this summer has been far less like that, and I genuinely believe that my bedroom feeling entirely like mine is a big reason for that. I might not be as independent as I want, I might not be surrounded by the same friends all year round, but I feel like the same person I was two months ago, and I might even be a similar person in two months’ time. I do wonder who I’ll be by the end of my time at university.