Homesick

I’d never been away from my home for too long growing up, I suppose I was lucky in that regard. The longest periods away were often a few weeks, for the times we went on holiday, and even then, there were always people there who I knew, be it family or friends. Perhaps, then, that’s why moving away knocked me as much as it did.

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I was never worried about moving to university beforehand, in fact I was more excited about it until the day I arrived, when a feeling of dread hit and stuck. I was out of my element in a place I didn’t know with people I’d never met and was stuck with an uneasy feeling in my gut. My appetite went before I even realised I was terribly homesick, for the first few weeks I barely ate a thing, neither did I want to eat anything as whenever I tried, I’d feel close to vomiting each time. I was isolated, felt stuck in the tiny room that would be the only private space I had for the coming year, and not even wanting to talk to the friends I did have outside of university.

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I couldn’t have been the only one who experienced this – after all, homesickness is common enough – yet it never showed on the faces of others I met, I never found anyone who outwardly showed signs of what I was experiencing.

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It was a long month until I next saw anyone I recognised, one fraught with distancing myself from people, not being in the mood to talk to anyone or do anything. It was a cousin’s birthday, which I was going down to Kent for a couple of days for. Over those days, the two worlds of being at home and being away started to mesh, two states of being that I’d separated began to come together and provided a comfort of sorts. It’s never really felt natural to be away from home, but from that point onwards, it became gradually less damaging.