Letter 10
Re: What Homesickness Actually Is
Dear Immigrant,
Homesickness is not missing a place. It is missing a version of yourself that only existed in that place.
The self that existed at home was embedded in a specific context — a language, a set of relationships, a cultural understanding, a physical landscape. That self was known. Known by the people around it, known by the institutions it moved through, known by the streets and the sounds and the food. In the new place, that self is not known. You are new. You are starting from zero. The version of you that existed at home cannot exist in the new place yet because the context that made it possible has not been rebuilt.
What you miss when you are homesick is not the place as a place. It is the ease of being yourself in that place — the absence of the effort of translation, the relief of being understood without explaining, the comfort of being known rather than being new. These are losses. Real ones. They do not mean you made the wrong decision. They mean that the decision had costs, and the costs are being felt.
Homesickness decreases not because you stop caring about home but because you build enough of a new context that the self can exist in the new place without the constant effort of translation. This takes years. There is no shortcut. The only path through it is through it.
When the homesickness is acute — at the holidays, at the significant occasions you are missing, at the random Tuesday when a smell or a sound brings the absence flooding in — let it be what it is. Do not try to logic your way out of it. It is the appropriate response to a real loss. Feel it and let it pass.
The homesickness is evidence of what you love. That is not a problem to be solved. It is something to be held.
From someone who still feels it sometimes,
A former immigrant
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