Homesickness
September, 2024
For as long as I can remember, I’ve missed home.
Cut to me at 10 years old. It’s my first year at summer camp and I’m bawling my eyes out on the top bunk of a rickety metal bunk bed, a chorus of cicadas failing to drown out my wails. Somehow, between ten and eleven, I willed myself to forget those emotional outbursts, and I found myself at camp again the next summer. This time letting tears silently flow out of my cheeks as I paddled a canoe. I discovered that if I sat in the front and paddled really hard, the person behind me wouldn’t notice my shoulders moving up and down with each sob; my tears just blended in with the water.
Those tears flowed as I indulged in the fantasy of “home”. I would imagine myself in my bed, my mom holding me close, quelling my anxieties with the reassuring words, “Everything will be okay.” I envisioned us dancing while she cooked family dinners, laughter filling the kitchen as my dad recounted tales about growing up on a farm. In this imagined home, we were a happy family – supportive, unconditionally loving, and honest.
At twelve, I attended camp for four weeks, punctuated by a parent’s visiting day. Again, I cried in bunk beds, canoes, and bathrooms, questioning why I subjected myself to this yearly ritual. When my parents showed up for visiting day, I cried tears of joy while I hugged them both (my brother went to the same camp, so he was already there). But after just five minutes together, I barely recognized them. They didn’t match the parents I had missed in my head. My mom’s doting affection was overshadowed by her constant anticipation of my father’s needs and annoyances, and my dad’s silly stories gave way to cutting and hurtful remarks on almost everything my brother or I did. By the end of the day, I wanted them gone. I was confused. If these were my parents, who the hell was I missing for the past couple weeks?
Eventually I stopped going to summer camp, and the fantasy of my home-life faded amidst the sharp-edged reality of my family’s dynamic. My next significant experience away from home was college. At seventeen, I was desperate to get as far away from my childhood home as humanly possible. I would make a new home – one where I didn’t have to press my ear to the floor to monitor my parent’s arguments, where my brother’s dark cloud of depression didn’t seep under his locked door, where my mom didn’t raise her voice in a panic over questions best left unasked, where my dad didn’t aggressively berate her for dinner plates not being warm enough. I was ecstatic when I got accepted into UCSB, a dreamy school in Santa Barbara, California – literally as far away as I could get while staying in the U.S.
Today, as I enter my fourth year at UCSB, much has changed since I was seventeen and applying to college. My body, for starters – my disability manifested within weeks of arriving at college. My friendships – only two people from high school remain in my life, while my social circle has been a rotating cast of characters over the past three years. My gender – while I never really felt like a girl, I finally started using they/them pronouns and presenting authentically during my first year at college. Where I live – I’ve moved three times since my freshman year. My mental health – an unpleasant roller coaster of panic attacks, deep depressions, and the process of accepting my neurodivergence. I could go on for a while, but I’ll spare you.
What never changes, though, is this nagging feeling of homesickness, reminiscent of those summers at camp. I miss things that exist: my room with a lock on it, food in the fridge downstairs, the sound of my mom emptying the dishwasher in the early morning, and the soft fur of my dog. But I also miss things that don’t exist: my mom’s undivided attention, unburdened conversations with my brother, encouragement from my father, an overall feeling of safety.
Four years of college also means four years of traveling home for occasional breaks or summer holidays. Each visit feels like parent’s visiting day all over again: I’m initially ecstatic until I realize I constructed the home I’d been missing in my head, and this one doesn’t match up. The fantasy shatters. Despite all the changes I’ve undergone and initiated in California, I return to the same stagnant, silent state of home—a place where I don’t feel safe, where I float around in a dissociated haze, hypervigilant and jumping at the slightest sound.
I inevitably head back to school, often desperate to escape, only to rebuild the fantasy once more. I know intuitively that the home I imagine doesn’t exist, yet I miss it anyway. It offers a refuge from my dismal thoughts, my breaking body, my all-encompassing existential fear, the deep loneliness I sometimes feel in this college town filled with smiling, able-bodied, enthusiastic youth, from whom I feel profoundly disconnected.
But if this home I miss is a fantasy, if this town I inhabit only brings me isolation and anxiety, where do I belong? Where is home?
To answer these questions – or at least convince myself an answer exists – I’ve begun to imagine a special third place. Not here in this college town, nor in my childhood home, but somewhere else entirely. A place I feel safe, a place that holds me. I obsessively watch YouTube videos of tiny homes and apartment decor (nevertoosmall is my favorite channel), scour Zillow for the cheapest apartments in Brooklyn, look at adoptable cats, and try to envision a life for myself after I graduate and leave this small town. Maybe then I’ll finally find that elusive home.
Yet I worry. What if I’m the problem? What if I move to Brooklyn, land the job of my dreams, attend figure drawing every Wednesday night, adopt a snuggly orange cat, and still feel that nagging emptiness? That longing for the home, the family, that never truly existed in the first place.
