‘Home’ is an elusive term. Amongst many other things, it can be a place, an experience, a feeling, or even a person external from yourself. It can also simply be a sense of unsurpassable and established belonging. For those fortunate enough – which I am lucky to be able to say about myself – ‘home’ is a safe haven associated with comfort, familial care, and an abundance of love. ‘Home’ in this sense is often a space you can always come back to and look upon with fondness and a solid faith that there is no other such place. Thoughts of ‘home’ can be filled with nostalgia, warmth, and love – making it easy for someone in such a position to overlook the futility of the term itself.
When moving to university, there is often a process involved of ‘leaving home’. This can lead to students, such as ourselves, feeling a sense of physical and emotional displacement as we attempt to feel-out the new space which we are moving into, establishing a comfortable new rhythm of life attuned to its associations. The people are all new, the way life looks is altered, timings are put out of sync and commitments and responsibilities can pile up. For many, this transition doesn’t happen so smoothly and the new foreign space can feel too far removed from familiarity and routine. The resultant sense of displacement can very easily become overwhelming and ‘homesickness’ can ensue, which makes it impossible to fully live in-the-moment and enjoy this new place and experience to its full potential. If this does happen to you, it doesn’t mean that you are any weaker than anybody else. A study undertaken by the National Union of Students in 2008 revealed that 50-70% of UK freshers suffer from homesickness to some extent within their first 2-3 weeks, with the symptoms fading for most after the third week. This causes a sharp boundary to be made between the absent entity that is ‘home’ and that which is other-than ‘home’, making your new surroundings seem alien and, at times, claustrophobic. There are many ways to overcome this – however, I feel the most effective way to do this is to realise that ‘home’ isn’t necessarily just a space and to seek the positive aspects of ‘home’ in new ways. I’m not suggesting in any way that the solution to homesickness is to forget about ‘home’, but perhaps just to look at it from a different angle.
For some, however, this transition is easy, and the new place swiftly becomes another form of ‘home’. What happens next is something very interesting, for the looseness of the term ‘home’ begins to reveal itself. Now, instead of the one, irreplaceable and unique ‘home’ we thought we had, the new domain swiftly becomes a fresh, but different, configuration of ‘home’. In this case, the result is a rather clumsy and interchangeable distinction between the ‘new home’ (the place where life now happens, that feels ‘like home’) and ‘Home-home’ (the original ‘home’ or dwelling place). This happens for many people, revealing that the idea of ‘home’, instead of being a tangible and definable spatial term, is actually something far more conceptual and can therefore be discovered in places other than in the familial household. The feeling of something being ‘like home’, although it is notoriously difficult to define, can manifest itself in experiences such as the freedom of activity, a bond between close friends, a partner or in an entirely new space. Rupi Kaur, in The Sun and Her Flowers (p.g.213), defines the triumph of her struggle with ‘home’ as discovering that it ultimately lies not within others, but within herself.
Thus ‘home’ may feel like, or indeed physically be, a crumbling exterior, but at the same time it’s important to remember that ‘home’ in the physical or even external sense is not the be-all and end-all. Home, at the risk of sounding stereotypical, is ultimately where the heart is. Seek happiness both within and without and feelings of home may automatically follow.