Homesick Heartbreak & Tackling Big Life Changes

What is homesickness? Are we ever really prepared for it? And, why do we long for the familiar even when better options present themselves? Because change is hard.

Part of the reason people don’t achieve their goals or dreams is because the pursuit of those dreams involves change. And change is hard.

One of the biggest changes someone can make is to move towns to seek bigger, different—fancier, even—life pursuits. This may come when leaving for college. Or post-collegiate adventures to big metropolitan cities. In each of those cases it’s expected that there might be some adjustment period.

If you look up “homesickness,” you mostly find resources to support young people in that first move away from home. Maybe resources for families moving overseas or a member of the armed forces being stationed abroad. And outside of those instances, as we go through our day-to-day, the reference to “homesickness” decreases precipitously (from my own anecdotal data). And the state of being homesick may not even cross our minds. Until it does.

A Story

The last time I was homesick was 1992.

My family moved back to Saudi Arabia, to where I’d been born but had no recollection of. I was the middle of seventh grade. Let me say that again — it was the middle of seventh grade: the middle of the middle year of middle school. I had just pulled off the impossible: after having been the unknown new girl the year before, I’d become a cheerleader and infiltrated the very small, tight popular cloister that was tethered to one specific girl in classic Queen Bee fashion. Being new, I never learned how she became the de facto leader of the grade, but I was smart enough to know that to be closer in the hive is better for survival.

And then it was announced that we were moving. To goddamn Saudi Arabia.

Photo by Briana Graham on Unsplash

I’ll skip ahead to say, I adapted. I learned that learning how to make friends was a survival mechanism and I was getting good at it. As much as I resisted letting my parents be right in making this bold move for their family, the monumental shift lifted me out of the blinders that seventh grade popularity had placed on me, and being free from the influence was liberating.

Many times I’ve looked back on this as time as a huge lesson.

I learned that the dictates of one small community do not extend indefinitely. Way before websites and social media could show us what life was like elsewhere, I needed to be extricated to see that one sphere of popularity was not all-encompassing. Weird middle school subcultures were, in fact, transitory. Which meant that weird insular subcultures anywhere did not have to be taken as fact. I went on to attend three high schools in four years. I became great at being a New Kid. I could dip in and out, I made a lot of friends along the way. I was a cross-cultural world traveler and became highly adaptable…Resilient, you could say (since that’s a term we like to throw around over here).

A New Chapter

And yet this year, at 44 years old, I was stricken with homesickness something fierce. I wasn’t being dragged across the world against my will. I was moving to a place I wanted to live. One of those areas of the world I’d encountered in my three-high-schools-in-four-years phase of life. A place I felt drawn back to for the beautiful seasons, an educated and culturally aware population and few 100-degree days, if any (important for my MS). We chose this. So rationally I felt like I couldn’t complain or that I should be able to point out to my heart that we’re ok and that this was a really good idea, rationally at least.

And yet.

We moved just two and a half months after giving birth, away from my parents, who had lived close to us back in Texas.

The cherry blossoms and dogwood of Northern Virginia were welcoming us, but I had an ache I hadn’t felt since 1992. We had succeeded in changing our lives but I realized homesickness can still afflict the well-traveled and determined.

Yes, over the years I’d become a pro at making friends but it’s still awkward and still a process. Life is disoriented for a bit as you learn new street names and where highways intersect. Grocery stores feel different, and while that may have been exciting to me as I moved to LA and NYC in my 20s and 30s, suddenly it just felt strange. There is much literature on how to change a habit (how to successfully quit smoking/lose weight/eat healthier/do more in less time, etc), but what about when everything changes and your base of support feels like an ice floe adrift?

In the book, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard (used as a text in a university class called Leading Change and where I gave a talk on heart-centered Change Management for leaders), research shows that we should look for bight spots. Meaning, the human mind likes to analyze problems (….raising hand), but we don’t analyze successes. But there are always bright spots. When getting through tough times, looking for the bright spots can get us through. For me, I kept looking at the cherry blossoms, the dogwood, the wild berries that grew in yards on my morning walk (taking me to a place that I thought only existed in Anne of Green Gables or my imagination). I let my gaze fall on deer dappling the open lot behind our kitchen window.

These helped. And gradually we learned the road names and the highway intersections. Though I can say that without a doubt, moving away from your parents when they are in their 70s and you have your firstborn newborn was ever so slightly harder than moving in the middle of seventh grade once you became a cheerleader. I’m being sarcastic. Both, truly, both were soul crushing.

Conclusion

The calendar pages fall away and time passes. Babies grow and surroundings begin to feel more familiar. Kind souls volunteer to be your friend. Bright spots grow.

I think the heartbreak I experienced isn’t just specific to a cross-country move later in life. We cling to habits that make us feel safe, so anyone trying to attempt a big life change might also be presented with a jarring and unexpected feeling of loss. That’s ok. When you’re in the middle of something big, it starts to feel like we should just go back to how things were. Every time I’ve moved, I’ve hit that point—where the process (not to mention emotions) start to feel insurmountable. But keep going. If all the arrows in life are pointing to a new exciting direction: keep going.

Put one foot in front of the other and keep going.

The Post Script

Robert Earl Keen, a musician beloved by Texans, ended up as a part of the soundtrack to our move. Maddeningly, my non-Texan husband finally embraced the album that had been a huge part of my college years at the University of Texas just as I was longing to be back in Austin. (But, on the plus side, we were finally listening to Robert Earl Keen, with his particular Texas twang, throughout the house.)
…And only sometimes did he see the tears come to my eyes as I looked out on those deer dappling the lot beyond the kitchen window as the music played.

Treat yourself to this song, and double treat yourself to click through and read the comments. They’re powerful.

Enjoy and happy Friday, xx