Let's Talk About Homesickness

I’ll be honest with you… coming back to Tufts for my second semester was tough. In fact, my first few weeks back on campus were beautifully painful in its own way.

Let me explain.

For a while, I’ve had this empty feeling in my chest. It feels like someone carved a hole in my heart and ripped out a piece of me. I don’t really know how to explain it, but it feels a little bit like hurt, pain, grief and longing for something to happen all jumbled up together in one big mess. I feel like there’s something wrong with me, and worst of all, I feel guilty for feeling this way. 

For the longest time, I repressed this feeling. I decided to wear a mask and pretend this “hurt” I was experiencing was simply a symptom of moving overseas for a long time. More than ever, I refused to believe it was homesickness. I viewed homesickness as a sign of weakness; a sign that I wasn’t capable of being away from my parents, my home, my sister, or my friends; a sign that I wasn’t ready to leave the glory years of high school behind yet; a sign that I was not ready to grow up.

But, the more I hid my homesickness behind a smiling face, the more I tried to cover it up because I didn’t want to feel weak, the more it hurt. The hole in my chest only got bigger and bigger, and like all things on Earth when under immense pressure, I cracked. 

On a Thursday night, as my roommate was preparing to head back for the long weekend, I stood in the middle of the room with my friend Sean, and I cried. And let me tell you, I couldn’t stop crying because I missed home. There, I said it, I missed home. It was the part of me that was missing, and being 9,394 miles away from Singapore was only making it worse. I couldn’t hop onto the next bus or train to head back. Home was an 18 hour flight away, and whenever I saw my Northeast friends heading home for the long weekend, I was sad and envious.

Yet in the midst of my darkest point, I found my light. It was only through acknowledging the fact that I was homesick that I was able to move forward. It was only through recognizing the fact that I felt so alone in my journey that I was able to see that so many other people around me experience these same raw emotions. In college, we’re all in the same boat. We’re all trying to adjust to new environments and experiences. For some people, homesickness hits a lot harder than others. Nevertheless, we’re all away from our parents, our siblings, our hometowns, our cultures, and our traditions. As first years, we’re tossed into a new boat of experiences, expected to get everything right on the first try, but it’s okay to mess up. It’s okay to feel this way.

College lacks familiarity, but like everything in life, good things take time. On this journey through life, you can’t expect everything to happen perfectly on the first try. It takes time to build new places into new homes. We’re human; we make mistakes; we fall down, and we get back up to try again.

Homesickness is not a sign of weakness, and it should never be labeled like that in society. Homesickness just means you had something really beautiful to lose. Something crazy, magnificent, lovely, unreal, and wonderful, whether that’s a tangible object, a person, a home, or a feeling. It doesn’t matter whether you’re from nearby Somerville/Medford or all the way from the other side of the world, we all experience these emotions and feelings in the same way. Everyone experiences some degree of homesickness, whether they like to admit it or not.

But I’ve learned that there’s a remedy, and it’s a mixture of time, acknowledgement, and integration into a new community. For me, it’s being able to rely on the International Community at Tufts. Through SIMSA and other culture clubs, I’ve been able to form amazing friendships and receive stability and support through my first year journey. I’ve been able to find a home away from home, and I feel happy to be here. I feel alive, and I feel loved.

So, if there’s anything I’ve learned, it’s this: you can choose to be happy or you can choose to be sad. Not to be cheesy, but it’s truly that simple. You can pick the path of wallowing in your sadness and never finding joy in a new environment, or you can pick up the broken pieces and start again. Trust me, it’s hard. And for some, it’s a lot harder than it looks, but it’s worth a try.