How I Know I’m Growing Up
November 14th, 2025
Photo: Sam Luper
Writer: Anushi Varma
Editor: Paige Miller
For the first time in two years, I spent more than a month at my childhood home with my parents. Like many other burnt-out college students returning home, I was relieved to feel taken care of. I enjoyed getting help with my laundry and receiving fresh home-cooked food. My life finally felt a little easier.
A week or so into my stay, I sat down at the kitchen table waiting for my mom to finish cooking. Growing up, I loved home-cooked food more than anything. The taste of fresh rice and the remarkable spice of cooked greens and lentils is a distinct, nostalgic feeling. This time, when I ate my dinner, it felt different. The satisfaction I used to receive from eating home-cooked food felt diminished. But nothing had changed: not the recipe, not the ingredients, not the meal. When I sat at the dinner table and looked down at my food, I felt that it was me who had changed, and the experience of eating home-cooked food suddenly felt a little too distant.
I’m a senior, and I really only started branching out with cooking in my junior year. What started out as pesto pasta and turkey and cheese sandwiches – dishes my mom taught me – blossomed into chicken parm and shrimp scampi. I grew to love the food I had learned to make by myself, which I had never tasted from the hands of my parents before. For the past two years, I had cooked for myself and eaten food that I never ate back home. So, sitting at that dinner table, I felt detached. I was so accustomed to the food I cooked for myself that I, surprisingly and disappointingly, felt less inclined towards the food I was brought up on.
Sometimes, in the most random and minute of ways, I realize the growth and change I’ve experienced. My everyday meals have become a reminder of how much I’ve seen and experienced beyond my hometown. In some ways, I’m proud of how I’ve changed, and in other ways, I feel bad for “leaving behind” the formative and endearing experiences that made me who I am. Certainly, there’s no easy resolution to these conflicting feelings, but I’ve chosen to make peace with them. Gaining real-world, “big girl” skills is a huge accomplishment that is done while embracing the memories and feelings of my upbringing. Rather than seeing my childhood and adulthood as two distinct “wholes”, I choose to see them as two halves that come together to create something far more beautiful and nuanced. Even now, I’m grateful that I get to experience eating home-cooked food, despite all the achievements I’ve made in cooking. I’m able to channel my childhood and adulthood together, never having to trade off one for the other. Regardless of the way our feelings will change as time takes us further away from childhood, what matters most is the lasting impact it has had on us. No matter what obstacles or circumstances come our way, our upbringing will always be meaningful and never forgotten, in its unique way.
