How to Deal with Homesickeness
13:25
I have a confession to make: at certain points during making
the move to a new country completely on my own, I have felt sad. I am a
resilient and positive person but I'm still a person. Life as an Erasmus
student is pretty great but, just like life as a regular UK student, it's not
perfect. Mood-swings still occur. Stress still exists. Sometimes I miss
Bristol. Sometimes I even miss Hertfordshire. Not being one inclined toward
indulging in self-pity, I have come up with some coping strategies for when
these days occur and I have written them down in the hope that someone else
might find them useful.
Feeling homesick has been a pretty new experience for me. My hometown is small
and, while London is close enough that I can claim to be a Londoner while
living abroad, the exorbitant prices and poorly-timed trains make
going out there something of a stretch. This meant that the excitement of
moving to a city where the bars are licensed to stay open later than midnight
somewhat eclipsed the fear of change when I went to university in 2011. My
parents are both graduates who moved out of their family homes to study so
there was no pressure from them to visit home during term time, especially as
we regularly keep in touch using Facebook and Skype. In the event that I have
felt genuinely homesick (and I honestly can't think of a single specific moment
when this has happened) the knowledge that my home is a relatively short
journey away is the ultimate comfort blanket.
Unsurprisingly, this has changed since I arrived in Italy. Home is no longer a-few-hours-down-the-M4 away. Unless you're extremely wealthy, spontaneous trips home are effectively ruled out when you're suddenly faced with hundreds of miles of land and a fairly significant expanse of sea separating you and your house. I also have a whole new life to miss. Some of my favourite people are in Bristol and their lives, shockingly, are continuing without me. Flicking through a lot of photos online that would normally contain me can occasionally bring on pangs of sad wistfulness. Pavia is great but so is Bristol. Not having felt homesick before almost made it harder. Having never really experienced this emotion in any real way, I had to learn to deal with it from scratch.
At first, on occasions when I woke up feeling a little down
in the dumps I decided that I could rationalise my feelings away. I was only
sad because I wasn’t trying hard enough to appreciate my time here. This slowly
led to what was originally a fairly innocuous bad mood becoming a full-on shame
spiral as I became more and more caught up in feeling bad about feeling bad. Gradually,
throughout the day, I turned from a slightly downbeat version of myself to a
moping mess of a person. Instead of confronting my feelings, working out what
had caused me to feel that way and trying to find ways to remedy it, I had
simply attempted to convince myself that I had no right to my own emotions and
this had proven incredibly unhelpful. A lot of the time, we can’t control how
we feel on a day-to-day basis. Invalidating your own feelings doesn’t make them
go away; it just makes you feel worse about the whole situation.
I’m fortunate that I haven’t had enough “down days” for this
to have had a significant impact on my life here, but after a couple of them
occurred I worked out that this attitude wasn’t going to help me at all and
that I needed to find a new way of dealing with missing the UK. Going home
simply wasn’t an option, partly for financial reasons and partly because I felt
that this would just exacerbate the problem for me. Ultimately, I am a
grown-up, or at least most of the way towards becoming one. There will come a
point for me when “going home” in its current sense will no longer be an
option. If going back home becomes my primary way of solving my problems, it
will just make it harder when the time comes that it’s no longer my home
anymore. Jumping in at the deep end is a lot more effective if you’ve already
learnt what to do once you’re in the water.
Something that the academic staff at university never tell you, but which people who have been on years abroad may well, is that it's not always fun. It's easy to get caught up in the idea that Erasmus will be nothing but decadence and enjoyment, especially during the first couple of weeks which, for most of us, consist of meeting hundreds of new people desperate to be your friend and endless parties. Once we settle down into some vague semblance of a student routine, however, it starts to resemble normal life again. For me, normal life is great most of the time but there will always be days when I don't feel wonderful. The problem with being on Erasmus is that I still have roughly the same number of those days but I'm very far away from the people I normally turn to for comfort. This may seem like a downbeat attitude to take but, actually, reminding myself of this generally leads to me feeling more positive. Accepting that my feelings are normal has proven a much better way of cheering myself up than trying to invalidate them and making myself feel guilty.
As I’ve said before, being in Pavia is a wonderful opportunity for me. As merely saying this to myself over and over again until I felt like I was being hit repeatedly with a stick with “YOU ARE UNGRATEFUL” carved into it didn’t work, I decided to actively go out and actually experience the great things about the city for myself. Now if I wake up feeling sad or even just a little bored, I go out for dinner and appreciate the fact that you can get great pizza for less than a fiver. I make a trip to a nearby city that I’ve never been to before and make the most of the opportunity to explore a part of the world that I might not get again for a long time. I meet up with friends and enjoy having the most international friendship group I will probably ever have in my lifetime. Actions speak louder than words; they speak even louder than insidious internal guilt trips.
In my attempts to keep busy by exploring the local culture, I have recently found
the best cure for homesickness of all. I hate to conform to national stereotypes
but this has taken the form of a pub. It's a short walk from the main square in
Pavia and it reminds me of Bristol in the very best way. You can play a board
game or take a book from the shelf, and if the books don’t appeal there’s a
wide selection of newspapers to choose from. A large number of them appear to
be communist but, let’s be honest, this comes with the territory with hipster
cafés. There’s even a piano – not that I had any strong desire to hear anybody
play it as the music from the sound system was so perfectly catered to my
tastes that I almost suspected the owners had hacked into my Spotify account.
At one point, a huge bowl of pasta and several plates were brought out and the
patrons were encouraged to help themselves to it for free. This free hot meal
is not only open to paying customers but for homeless people, which struck me
as rather lovely. From now on, any days when I miss home, this is where I will
go. It’s like my own little corner of Bristol with all the advantages of being
in Italy. When going home isn’t an option, a couple of home comforts can often
serve just as well.
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