"What It’s Like When You Feel Homesick But You’re Already Home"

I love this article that I stumbled upon on Elite Daily while I was alone with my thoughts during the wee hours of the morning earlier (probably around 4am. Haha). It's basically about longing for the familiarity even though a lot have change.

Below are excerpts from the article that really hit me:

. . .home isn’t really a tangible place. Home is a feeling. Home is you.

When you’ve lost sight of who you are, no where in the world will ever feel like home. You will feel homesick all of the time when you’re disconnected from yourself.

Even when swaddled into the oh so familiar, safe arms of home. Nowhere is safe when your mind isn’t a safe place.

It wasn’t just my old self that I missed. I was also homesick for a time and place that no longer existed.

As we get older and briskly move forward in our lives, we somehow expect home to magically stand still.

We think that home is a constant, that it will never change and that everything will look and feel the same no matter how long we abandon it.

The truth is, home changes as much as we do.

Our parents evolve into a different phase of their lives after we leave. Our friends, even the ones who remain stagnant in our hometown, grow in vastly different directions than we would have ever expected. Our favorite mom-and-pop stores close and are replaced by looming corporate chains.

We can’t expect our little towns to stay on pause while we go off and explore the world. The only consistency is inconsistency.

And eventually, “home” might look more unfamiliar than the big teeming city you call “home” as an adult.

I was homesick for a fantasy.

Part of growing up is learning to look at the world through a realistic lens. When we’re kids, we look at the seemingly massive world with glittering rose-colored glasses strapped to our little faces.

When we’re kids, we think our parents are the moral gods of the universe, and their opinions are surely the only opinions that are correct.

We see the little towns we reside in as beatific, and beautiful, and perfect and pretty. We think all the people we grow up with are the best friends we will ever have for the rest of our lives.

Then we grow up and start to see things as they are, not as we wish they were. The fantasy is ripped out of our delicate fingers and replaced by the cold fist of reality.

We realize our parents are two complicated, flawed adults who are simply doing their best but have made (and continue to make) a slew of mistakes.

Sometimes we realize the place we called “home” is actually a small-minded, painfully conservative hick town, and we don’t feel comfortable there. At all.

And most of all, our “best friends” from childhood, we don’t have a damn thing in common with anymore.

As adults, when we’re homesick, we so often long for the fantasy of childhood. To the time when we thought our parents were perfect entities and our high school friends were the best friends we would ever have until the day we died.

When I planted the roots in myself, my homesickness lifted.

It was only when I took the long walk back to myself that my homesickness lifted.

I learned home isn’t a place. It’s not a shattered memory of the girl I once was. It’s not in the familiar faces of my old friends. It’s not even in my warm, loving family that I hold in the deepest part of my heart. It’s in me.

When you make peace with yourself and your reality, you’re always at home. Because home lives within you. It’s like that old Buddhist saying:

Wherever you go, there you are.

Start building roots in yourself. Because things change. Cities evolve. People leave us unexpectedly. Everything we thought we knew can be taken from us in an instant.

But no one can ever rip you away from you.