Carrying memories of homecoming…and how to create new ones 

My parents found an old photo of me on the homecoming court at Xavier University. Miss P1, elected to represent my first-year class of pharmacy students. I almost didn’t recognize myself at first. Straight dark hair. A smile that came easy. I remember that girl. I remember that season being good. What I don’t remember, as clearly, is the season that came after.

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For three of my four years at Xavier University College of Pharmacy, I was carrying something heavy that most people around me never saw. So, when people talk about their homecoming memories, I have to search harder than most. The parties. The yard fellowship. The inside jokes with a tight circle of friends. The memories people assume stayed with you from college, I have fewer of those than I’d like to admit. Not because nothing happened during those years, but because so much of what happened involved surviving an abusive relationship.

I used to feel a quiet embarrassment about that gap.   

Like I was missing a chapter, a core memory, everyone else got to keep. Every year, when homecoming season rolled around, my timeline would fill up with old photos and reunion plans…and that same small hole within me would show up right on time, giving me the sense that I should have more to hold onto than I do.

Yet, somewhere along the way, I started showing up anyway. For the last eleven years, I’ve made it a point to attend homecoming. Hugging classmates. Catching up with sorority sisters. Laughing about things only we would understand. It feels like reconnecting, year after year, to a version of community I wasn’t able to hold onto the first time around. This year, that reconnection went a step further with me joining the Xavier University of Louisiana National Pharmacy Alumni Group. A small thing on paper, but it felt like another open door welcoming me back into a place I once only partly belonged to.

I have been a pharmacist for twenty-three years. These days, beyond the alumni gatherings, I spend a good part of my time mentoring and precepting students and residents, some of them at Xavier, in the same halls I walked through during those traumatic years I still can’t fully remember.

When I was a student in college, I didn’t always have someone paying close attention to what I was carrying underneath the performance of doing everything “right.” So, now, when I’m in front of a student, I try to be the kind of presence I needed back then. Someone who notices there’s more going on than what’s on paper. Someone who makes it clear that whatever they’re carrying, they don’t have to carry it invisibly.

In 2027, Xavier University’s College of Pharmacy will mark its centennial. I find myself genuinely excited to be part of that—not as the girl in the homecoming photo, but as the woman who gets to help write what comes next for future generations of students. Being involved in this milestone feels like its own kind of homecoming. One that has little to do with nostalgia and everything to do with purpose.

I don't have this wrapped up in a tidy bow.   

Sometimes, I still find myself sitting with the gap between the girl in that photo and everything that came after her survival. But I’ve stopped needing the memory bank to be full in order to call myself home. Homecoming doesn’t require a full memory bank; it only asks you to keep coming back.

While I don’t have all the homecoming memories from my years at Xavier University, I do have this one: standing in those same halls now, I am reconnected, involved and doing the kind of work I once needed someone to do for me.

Have you ever returned to a place that didn’t give you everything the first time, only to let it give you something new the second time around?

Dr. Alisha Reed is a licensed pharmacist and a boy mom who is unapologetic about self-care. She is the creator of the REFILL Strategy, hosts the Your Self Care Prescription podcast, and is passionate about teaching women how to advocate for themselves.