2nd Sep 10
Preparing for Living Away From Home
by Emma Shores
As a young person, leaving home can be an emotional time for you and your family so the following pieces of advice should help.
Spend time with family. More often than you realise, it’s likely you see your family for about an hour a day. Dedicate a whole day for you and your family to spend with each other. Take photographs of how you are now and do something fun like a picnic or go to art gallery or something you’re all interested in. You can keep these photographs wherever you are in the future and remember your family as they are and not how they were. You’ll realise you’re grown up and it will be easier because you’ll reflect on the journey you’ve had up until this point in your life, so you will look at things much more positively.
When packing, leave an entire day, if not more, to organise what you are leaving in storage and what you are taking with you. If you are going to University or you are moving in with friends if you have a job, then it may be worth keeping a few of your belongings at home. Even if these are things such as books from your childhood, if you know there will be a point in the future where you will be moving out and separating from the people you are currently living with within the space of a year or two, it may be worth keeping a lot of things boxing them up.
See friends before you leave. This is vital because if you are travelling away or if your friends are and you are staying relatively nearby then you need one last get together. Like the family day that was suggested earlier, take recent photographs of you with your friends and maybe make a scrapbook full of memories and writings from your friends to you and vice versa. You can keep in touch with your close friends via the Internet and maybe web camera or on the phone. However, wherever you are leading to you will make new friends and you will need to feel like you have the ones you’ve got in order to feel confident enough to approach people and make new ones.
Meet people online that’ll be living near your area via online internet social websites such as Facebook or Twitter. You can narrow down people that live in your soon-to-be area and you can contact them and ask them questions or maybe even just begin talking so that you know a few people. Even if you don’t meet up for a while it is always good to know what the people are like and you can find out about socialising in your area by searching on the internet.
Make sure you know how to live by yourself. Strangely enough it is difficult to use a washing machine when you’ve never used one before. Just as it is to iron or cook when you’ve never done it before. Living without your family will most likely introduce situations to you that you’ve never dealt with or, perhaps, even dreamt of before – such as cleaning the toilet or wiping down the kitchen floor. If you are still living at home with some time to spare, maybe ask the person who carries out all these tasks to help you learn how to deal with these things and maybe help them out too by offering to do them yourself. They will appreciate it and you will end up appreciating what they do, too – but it will make a drastic difference in the way you prepare for leaving home because you will know how to run your own home both safely and effectively.
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