Every time I go home over a break, something is different. Nothing drastic has occurred — it’s always some small, barely noticeable shift that leaves me vaguely unsettled until I figure out what it is. The coffee table is turned 45 degrees, or there are new handtowels in the bathroom. The last time I went home, for fall break, there was a rather lifelike artificial rooster surveying the dining room from atop a tall stack of shelves in the corner. As I recoiled in horror, my father proudly announced that it had been his purchase. The fake fowl regarded me with disinterest from its lofty perch; I nodded in feigned appreciation.

Today marks the onset of Thanksgiving break and with it comes the annual campus exodus, in which thousands of students make the journey back home to argue with relatives and gorge themselves on turkey and stuffing until they drift into tryptophan-induced delirium. For more than 3,000 freshmen, this will be their first home-from-college Thanksgiving, which means that it will be an opportune time for them to notify all of their closest family and friends that they are gay or — even worse — Republican.

Tomorrow night, Cornell students across the country will be squeezing into their now-too-small childhood beds and lying awake in the dark, examining the artifacts of their youth by the glow of a teddy-bear nightlight. I know the scene all too well: stuffed animals cast monstrous shadows across the walls, and plastic spelling bee trophies reflect the barest glimmer of light from the darkened recesses of the room. Everything smells musty, static. It’s difficult to ignore the feeling of suffocation.

But even asphyxiation is better than the alternative, which is coming home to find that, in your absence, your parents have cleared out all of your stuff and converted your room into something completely different, like a guest room or a meat freezer. The sense of abandonment is unparalleled; your room is sacred ground, and nothing should be moved from its place. In fact, the day you left, your parents should have constructed a papier-m�ch� stand-in who could sit on your bed and be equally unresponsive to their prying questions.

Going home for the holidays brings about a whirlwind of conflicting emotions. On the one hand, you don’t want things to have changed — but on the other hand, it feels stifling to be shoehorned into the same juvenile role that you’ve always played. This ambivalence makes sense when considered within the framework of the process of separation that stretches from early adolescence into adulthood.

There are several different components of individuation, and each is generally gained at a different age. The first component is the de-idealization of parents, which is usually acquired in early adolescence. It’s a big part of the reason why teenagers are so notoriously obnoxious; they no longer see their parents as omnipotent and omniscient, and instead start to see them as annoying and stupid. Parents usually eschew the term “de-idealization” in favor of “becoming an obnoxious little shit.”

The second component is slightly broader and comprises the many different ways in which one attempts to discard previous dependence on parents. This is a far more gradual process: Early on, adolescents stop going to their parents with problems and instead turn to their peers; later, they begin to form their own opinions on political and religious issues; and, hopefully at some point, they stop siphoning money out of their parents’ bank accounts and start earning their own paychecks.

The third component is the ability to see one’s parents as people in their own right. This is the trickiest one, because it’s doubtful whether anyone ever actually acquires it. It’s almost impossibly difficult to shed the childhood illusion that your parents exist solely to protect and care for you. I called home on my mother’s birthday this year and couldn’t help but feel wounded when, amidst the sounds of laughter and revelry, I was asked, “Why are you calling?”

So of course it’s difficult to go home; the tension between the desire for independence and the stubborn inability to acknowledge that your parents’ lives go on without you creates an oscillating hatred of change. You don’t want to sleep on the same old threadbare sheets adorned with bunnies and ducklings, but you don’t want your parents to have ceremoniously burned them the week after you left for college. You don’t want to do the same old chores that you had to do back in high school, but you don’t want your parents to have worked out a system that doesn’t involve you.

Holidays can be especially challenging because they’re so often accompanied by well-worn traditions, the slightest change of which can raise doubts about the integrity of the entire system. When my roommate discovered that her mother was making the stuffing from a mix this year, she remarked to me with dismay, “I don’t even particularly like the damn stuffing. It just has to be the same.” A canister of Stovetop can mean the difference between a happy family holiday and your parents running off to Rio to build an ice factory.

They say you can’t go home again, and perhaps “they” are right; once you leave home, you can never be back in the same capacity. As college students, we are standing on the precipice of adulthood, and the ambivalence we feel upon tripping over the new ottoman or sleeping under the benevolent gaze of a 15-year-old Rainbow Brite poster echoes our reluctance to make the leap. We live in a precarious balance — what will finally push us over the edge?

My money is on the rooster; I swear that thing was giving me a funny look.