A Cheery and Optimistic Christmas Post

Hey everyone! It’s been a long time since I’ve posted anything, and so I was planning on doing a giant photo dump and write a huge post just covering everything in between Thanksgiving and Christmas. When I sat down to write this though, it just wasn’t happening.

To be honest, I went through a rough two or three week period in November/December where I was incredibly homesick, and so I think it’s worth talking about.

When I tell people I’m an exchange student, the first thing they usually ask is, “But don’t you get homesick?” and of course the answer is yes. However, when I try to explain homesickness in its complexity, people lose interest. It isn’t that they don’t care, but it’s simply that explaining your deep emotional issues isn’t polite small talk.

I don’t think that we talk about homesickness properly. We picture it as this vague, nostalgic emotion, almost romantic in some ways. We write about it using flowery metaphors, talking about being lost at sea or feeling hollow. And at every predeparture orientation, we artfully danced around the topic of homesickness, dodging all real or honest questions. I remember I even directly asked a retournee about it at my gateway orientation and he responded with, “Homesickness is just a thing that happens.” 

Brilliant advice, thanks.

But the truth is that he didn’t want to scare me. He didn’t want to tell us that the sickness in homesickness is not a metaphor, it is the reality of it. It’s a chronic illness that I have to live with for a year. There will a good two weeks where I’ll feel perfectly fine, and then it will flare up again. It’s sharp and painful and erratic. It comes and goes in waves, strikes hard and fast, and leaves behind a profound sense of isolation. It’s the ache of the uprooted plant.

Everyone wants to say that the cure for homesickness is to get off of Facebook, to skype your parents a bit less, to try to immerse yourself fully in your host country. But these solutions are cures for the side effects of homesickness: the loneliness, the frustration, the depression. They aren’t cures for the actual problem. The cure for homesickness is simply going home.

Home is the place of the concrete. Home is the place where I understand all of the inside jokes, where words roll off my tongue without thinking, where I live in a consistent and reassuring state of comprehension. Home is the state of knowing. And goddammit, I miss that.

So, yes, I’m homesick. I’m sure my friends here in France are tired of hearing about it. Believe me, if I could stop, I would. The reality is, though, that I’m not going home anytime soon; I just have to learn to coexist with the sickness for now. It’s a work in progress, and I have to be alright with that. I don’t have a choice.
I’m experiencing something different here that I don’t quite understand yet--I haven’t yet reached the state of comprehension, I’m not yet in the state of knowing. I figure by the time I get there, I’ll have to leave, and I’ll have a new type of homesickness all over again. At least I hope so.

Merry Christmas, everyone.