Mathew Biadun | Column Writer
College, in general, is the first time many students are away from home. Everything they had taken for granted is gone. Homecooked meals, high school friends, childhood bedrooms; all replaced with dorms and dining halls and new people.
Studying abroad is the freshman experience times one hundred.
Not only are the home cooked meals gone, the entire cuisine is. Your bedroom isn’t just replaced, but thousands of miles from all the friends and family you knew. The independence you feel is magnified by a thousand, but so is the distance from home. With that distance, one feeling will inevitably come, just like it eventually does to most college students.
Homesickness.
Homesickness is a concept most of us are quite familiar with. We were warned about it, or even taught about it directly from college-prep seminars and the like. It’s the feeling of missing your home, your family, and all the childhood staples you had gotten so very bored with, only for that stability to suddenly be absent.
Upon preparing for studying abroad, homesickness was something I very much knew about and was warned about. Missing your parents, who are an hour’s drive away, is one thing. Missing them from the other side of the planet is a whole other dilemma. If I were to go to Thailand, I would be leaving temporarily leaving my beloved family, great friends and my loving girlfriend. It was my greatest reservation as I prepared to leave, and the hardest part of the process was undeniably the day of leaving itself, when tears flew in free supply.
Homesickness isn’t something that hits at first. Upon your first arrival, you are so awestruck by the new sights and smells and sounds, new people and places, that your mind is well distracted from the old. It’s only when those new sights start to become bland, and just as ordinary and routine as all your old memories, that your mind starts to compare the two. The next-door restaurant is no longer new, but just your newest go-to, and your brain immediately begins comparing it to your old go-to.
Studying abroad is a strange experience, as you aren’t replacing any of your old familiarities. You will go back to your old friends, your old school, your old life. So when you pick a new ‘favorite cafe’, it's not replacing your old one. Merely covering it up in a way that can be messy and confusing. Rather than replacing your computer’s old CPU, you’re merely gluing a new one on top, and that’s bound to cause confusion.
When homesickness does hit, it's something that hits fast and hard, and out of seemingly nowhere. All you were doing was taking a walk, and suddenly that stray dog reminds you of your good boy back at home. Just a momentary thought can be enough to derail your day, and leave a pool of uncomfortable weight sludging around your stomach as you try and fail to think of something else.
One point that must be addressed is the unmeasurable benefit that technology plays in all of this. Forty years ago, the only contact you’d have would be a letter, sent and received perhaps once-and-month. Now, I can facetime my girlfriend every day, or send texts and emails, or all the rest. The great gift of technology is probably why my homesickness didn’t really hit me until halfway through the semester.
But all things catch up to you eventually. Phone calls and facetimes can only bridge the distance for so long, and as the weeks pass, that chasm only seems to grow wider. You start missing people more, missing home more, and it can sidetrack entire days.
The best way to cope with homesickness is to keep yourself busy. Go out with friends, exercise, engage in hobbies; anything that keeps your mind focused, rather than straying to thoughts of home. You can, and certainly should, talk with your family. But a balance should be struck between enough communication to feel connected to home, but not so much that all you can do is miss it.
Homesickness will certainly vary from person-to-person. The more you love your life, the harder it will be to leave it. But it is certainly a manageable process. If you are adventurous enough to happily consider a life across the ocean, homesickness is certainly no insurmountable obstacle.
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