Home Sweet Headache By Kiki Pape: I made leaving my hometown a personality trait—only to end up right back in it.

There’s this moment in your twenties when home stops feeling like a finish line or a fallback and starts feeling like… a throbbing little reminder that life isn't happening in the order you imagined. That’s the home sweet headache— that oddly tender, slightly painful sensation of returning to the place that raised you while you're still trying to raise yourself.

It is not dramatic. I should be stopping my tears; it is like walking into a familiar room and realizing the room isn't small — you've grown taller. You've changed in the weirdest of ways, and yet you're here, catching the reflection in the same windows you've stared out of at sixteen and attempted to sneak out of.

And then you see someone from high school. Maybe not someone you were close to — just a background character, but from that era of your life — picking up a pizza or grabbing a coffee. Suddenly, you are reminded that you're in this weird, suspended state. Not a teenager. Not a full adult. Just a person with a diploma.

You wake up one morning convinced you're late to your 9 AM lecture, only to remember you graduated… what? A couple of months ago? A year? Time feels like it isn’t measured by the school-supplies season.

And the funniest part? You did the whole “big move.” The whole “I’m leaving! I’m doing something with my life!” You clocked four years in college, making a whole personality out of leaving your hometown. Then the economy shrugged, job listings ghosted you, the rent prices laughed in your face, and suddenly — you're back.

Back in the place you swore you'd only visit for holidays and dentist appointments.

Then, you notice people are getting jobs because they somehow figured out how to go viral twice a month. Others are “taking the alternative,” and shockingly, it’s working. Meanwhile, you’re sitting there wondering if your LinkedIn headline should read:

“Trying My Best, PLZ Clap.”

Returning home in your twenties is humbling in a way no one warns you about. It is not failure, not even close — but it feels like your life pressed pause when everyone else’s pressed fast-forward. The kind of feeling where you walk into your favorite childhood spot, and there’s your new friend behind the counter, wiping tables. Or it’s you wiping tables, knowing someone from your graduating class might walk in at any second.

It is strange, it is human, it is oddly comforting. It is the headache that reminds you you’re still growing up. 

It’s the same headache everyone quietly develops when they return to their hometown — like the universe handing you a complimentary emotional hangover, similar to the one Rory Gilmore gets every time she walks back into Stars Hollow with an overpacked suitcase and a crisis she’s pretending isn’t a crisis.

There’s something so specific about being back in the place where every version of you has existed. Your childhood bathroom becomes a time machine you didn’t agree to enter. The lighting is still harsh, the mirror still judgmental, the cabinet still filled with products your mom swears have worked since “before you were born.” Suddenly, you’re seventeen again, trying to fix your hair before a football game you didn’t even want to go to.

Everyone comes home eventually — Taylor Swift to Pennsylvania, Selena Gomez to Texas, literally every character in every coming-of-age movie ever made. It’s practically a genre: the reluctant hometown return. The forced intimacy with your past. The awkward run-in at Target feels like a side quest in a video game you did not consent to playing.

But somehow, it's all comforting. Like the universe is letting you catch your breath between plot points. Like growing up doesn’t mean escaping your origins — it means learning to stand in them without feeling swallowed.