There is no feeling quite as lonely as the feeling of being homesick. It’s a lingering feeling of acute isolation that washes over your entire body. It’s a vacant feeling of being sorely disconnected. It’s one of the most pressingly painful feelings.
At times, the feeling seems to manifest itself into a jilted, jarring sensation not dissimilar to heartbreak. Your heart begins to feel heavy in your chest. You lose your appetite. It feels worse than loneliness, sort of like complete alienation. The emptiness follows you everywhere you go, and even though you try your best not to, you associate and relate it to past occurrences or even people of your past. Even booze and happy pills can’t fill the lonely gaps.
There are times, you feel overcome with an incessant longing for familiarity, and you have no idea what it is. Everything feels unknown. Even the pleasant smells of what used to make your heart pitter-patter…voices of certain people that would melt your skin and send a euphoria through your veins like nothing else would. Often times, you just cry into your pillow wondering why you feel the way you do. Sometimes you feel like you could dissipate into the thin air and not a soul would notice you were gone.
You sift through the days as if everything is fine and plaster on a stiff smile at work. Sometimes at night, you physically can’t even cry. Instead, you find myself staring blankly at the wall, numbing yourself because you knew if you allowed yourself to feel, you would fall into the same familiar grey vortex of hopelessness that your past put you in many, many times before.
You keep yourself immersed in blankness, but somewhere deep down, you ache for that old connection you once had before. Not the excessive abuse or lack of sympathy and love; but the good times; those great times. The times when even though it seems fake and unreal now, those good times had you in the moment and feeling like you were the best thing that ever happened to them. Even though they have proved time and time again that you meant nothing.
How could you be feeling so desperately homesick for a place that doesn’t want you home? Guilt and confusion join forces and invade your brain, and nothing makes sense. Immersing yourself in everything that usually makes you feel safe and connected is simply not working. Nothing provides relief, and you’ve realized it’s because you're not homesick for a place: You're homesick for a familiar feeling.
Your feeling of homesick isn’t a tangible place. You feel like you’ve let others cause you to lose sight of who you are, nowhere in the world will ever feel like home at this point. Even if those familiar arms wrapped around you so tight, there would still be that feeling of complete emptiness.
You're homesick for a time that no longer exists. A time when you actually trusted people. A time when you thought you were loved much more than you were.
As we get older and briskly move forward in our lives, we somehow expect home to magically stand still. We think that home is a constant, that it will never change and that everything will look and feel the same no matter how long we abandon it. The truth is, home changes as much as we do.
We are all homesick for that fairy tale love fantasy. We are homesick for that person who will eventually see our worth and everything we can offer. We are homesick for someone we don’t even know yet. I learned home isn’t a place. It’s not a shattered memory of the person we once were. It’s not in the familiar faces and smells. And it's not in your warm, loving home...
It’s in you.
And when we can learn to make peace with ourselves and understand reality, then we’ll learn to feel at home.
The Lord is my rock, my fortress and my deliverer; my God is my rock, in whom I take refuge, my shield, the horn of my salvation and my place for safety. He will cover me with his feathers and cloak; under His wings, I shall trust Him; His truth shall be my shield.
Psalm 18:2, Psalm 91:4
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