Homesickness creeps up on you stealthily, though you would think you could feel it coming. I awoke this morning realising that it had somehow wriggled between my ribs during the night and there it sat, its cold, smooth, bottom-heavy weight tugging invisibly like the lead sinkers we attached to a fishing line as kids.
I hadn’t anticipated it or noticed its approach, but I’ve lived away from home long enough to know that it is an inevitable part of the experience. As an emigrant, you settle into a new place. You absorb its rhythms and rituals as you once absorbed your native ones. The new world you live in begins to feel familiar and routine.
It’s often only then that you’ll start to feel the longing for home.
When the sense of novelty has left your everyday and you’ve relaxed into the complacency that comes with feeling more at ease in a place. There might be a triggering event – a big birthday at home that you miss, a reminder of time’s ceaseless progress, the illness or death of a family member. Someone’s wedding or the birth of a friend’s baby. Things that represent the deeper cost of the choice you have made to leave.
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Or it may be something happening in your own life – a period of poor health to remind you that being abroad without family and friends can be harder and lonelier than you ever anticipate when things are going well. The changing seasons in Australia – as the leaves drop and temperatures cool, social media is full of friends and family at home buoyed by longer days and the prospect of spring and summer. You shrug on a jumper as the natural world outside your window slows and cools, and you wonder how you might justify a visit home.
This homesickness is not a dissatisfaction with the life you have built abroad. Neither is it a wish to return home for good. It isn’t a yearning for return but rather for reconnection. It is an involuntary tendency to feel a little lost inside the distance between this and your other life – the one you left behind but which continued without you. Siblings’ and friends’ children stretching from the rotund cloud-soft pudginess of babyhood into the lankier, scuff-kneed energy of childhood. Parties and wakes and conversations you were absent from. Faces and locations that blur just a touch out of focus when you try to recall them in once familiar detail. Friends you realise you haven’t had contact with in a year, and wonder how you let that happen.
It all sounds a bit melodramatic, as though there is something uniquely difficult in homesickness. As if everyone you pass on the street is not carrying a similar weight in their ribs, thunk-thunking against the bone with each step. As if it is not the case that we all go about the mundanity of the day tugged at by the people who are gone, or the choices we did not make, or the opportunities that are out of reach for us now. Everyone nurses their own small but disproportionately heavy ache.
We are lucky if it’s small.
The Irish emigrant in Australia is, on average, luckier than their equivalent still at home when it comes to the ability to lead an independent, dignified life, find employment, access medical care and all the rest of it. This homesickness is just that – a small, persistent weight inside your chest. Manageable. Barely noticeable if you’re distracted, but there, nonetheless. It is not dramatic or debilitating. Just something you carry as an inevitable cost of the choice to leave home behind.
I was last home in the autumn, for work, and wonder now if I timed it wrong. If I should have delayed the visit until after I woke up with the lead sinker corded to my ribs. It has only been six months since my return to Australia and yet here the feeling is – thunk-thunk-thunk.
Lead against bone.
I have felt it when I lived in London, of course, when the pace of fluorescent-lit office life or the deserved but ceremonious self-importance of that city would have you weary and on a Ryanair flight home for the weekend. To decompress and feel at home among people who would say, “ah Jaysus sure what are you even alive for, so?” when you tell them that a two-hour daily commute is really pretty good for London, actually.
It didn’t take much to reconnect. You could just go home.
The stakes are higher in the antipodes, though, where a visit home is not a casual enterprise but something you need to plan, budget for and ultimately justify. If you go home now, you may not be able to when you’re really needed there – when someone is sick, or worse. You stack your preference against necessity, and think, “it can wait”.
Emigration is an exercise in fielding questions from all sides about whether you’re staying or going back. Most recently, my cat’s vet asked what my long-term plan was. It felt like an unbearably invasive experience for both me and the cat, as the vet simultaneously palpated the cat’s little stomach and probed my conception of my future life. Everyone who asks seeks finality, certainty, something concrete. You cannot ever really give it. You can only reference the most recent decision you made. And here you are.
In truth, homesickness is seasonal, situational and inevitable. It is a consequence of living in one place and belonging to another. It is evidence of that belonging, really. That the distance doesn’t diminish it but just makes it more complicated. A little heavier to carry, perhaps, but not so heavy that you’ll sink.
Homesickness is no fun, but neither is it a calamity.
It is evidence of a living connection with the place you come from, and there is comfort in knowing that.
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