When You Feel Homesick For a Place You’ve Never Been

“I haven’t found my true home yet.”

When someone says “I’m homesick”, often we assume they are in some foreign land, sighing in desperation:

“Oh, how I miss the weather, the people, the food, the comfort of my bed…”

Then, when they return home, guess what?

They’re still homesick.

It’s like you’re always missing something.

Instead of longing for an actual home (the town you grew up in, or the place where all your friends live), you’re longing for…a potential home. One that doesn’t exist physically.

It’s gotta be elsewhere, right?

It’s Not Even Homesick, It’s ‘Self-Sick’

Maybe it’s my natural fallacy of thinking the grass is greener on the other side.

If I escaped this hometown, I thought naively, I could become at ease with myself.

With that, you start fantasizing. You dream of packing your bags and moving to the mountains. Or you see yourself walking around skyscrapers, feeling so small and merging with the crowd.

A crowd that doesn’t know you, and you know nobody.

Then, if you’re lucky enough to move out, you start to realize that…

No, you did not magically transform yourself.

You still have anxiety. You’re still clumsy.

Your life is not as ideal as you thought it would be.

So you think: Maybe there’s another place where I can be 100% free.

But you know it’s a trap.

What you desperately want to escape from is not a place.

Maybe it's yourself.

You Crave a New Environment Because You Crave a New Identity

The fantasy of the ‘self-sick’ person:

If I get out, I’ll finally allow myself to be…myself.

You want a self that is confident and carefree.

But you won’t find it here, because here, you feel like you have to maintain a certain image: The one you’ve kept for months and years, to the people who know you.

Suppose you view yourself as the most serious, tense person in the world. It’s hard to act differently. Your subconscious won’t let you.

But what if you wound up on the other side of the world? Boom. You’re a relaxed and high-spirited person from day one. And no one bats an eye.

Of course, that’s a hypothesis. How can you be sure?

Maybe you’ll hop from city to city, only to realize that you still miss yourself, and your true home is nowhere to be found. Because everywhere you go, you don’t fit in. That’s the terror.

But what if...

Your Mind is Your Permanent Home

As long as you have a body and a brain, and the capacity to think.

A week ago I was feeling homesick, and then I thought:

No matter where I’m going, I’m always at home. My mental home, that is.

I’ve been ruminating and contemplating and reflecting and planning and debating with myself. All. The. Time.

I was always inside.

I never went out.

What the ‘self-sick’ person really wants is to escape the darkness of their mind. So they’ll visualize future possibilities.

Implying there is hope.

The coziest of vacations is the one you transport yourself, not with an airplane or a train, but with your own thoughts.

As Marcus Aurelius wrote in his Meditations:

“Nowhere you can go is more peaceful, more free of interruptions than your own mind.”

For all these years, you were traveling inside your head, visiting a potential you. And it doesn’t have to be a curse. I think it’s a gift to be able to envision yourself in a new light. After all, you are not meant to be a static being.

Your home — the consciousness you were stuck in since the day you were born — is the most ever-changing place you’ll ever visit.

So protect it well.

You could decorate your walls and renovate the furniture as you wish, until it slowly appears externally and you’ll sigh in relief: