Over the summer I spent my time traveling along the West coast. What started as three months living in Los Angeles studying through the Emerson LA program turned into an exploration of California’s mountains and a road trip to cross over the Golden Gate Bridge. Within three months I grew tired of my apartment in Toluca Lake and found myself restless to get on a plane that would drop me somewhere new. For three more weeks I found home in a small hostel outside the Olympic National Park in Port Angeles, WA. Whoever said the mountains would make you want to stay sure knew what they were talking about. Suddenly Washington turned into a weekend sleeping on a friend’s couch in Denver, Colorado and after a brief visit home to Ohio, I found myself riding in the back of a pick-up truck through un-paved streets in Nicaragua.
“Don’t you ever miss home?” is a question my parents and friends often ask me when they scroll through my Facebook, the only way people can really find my current location through photos and statuses about my next travel adventure. I usually reply with a simple shrug because, like most people, I do get homesick every now and then, but there’s this thing called out sickness that I have and its affects are stronger.
Out sickness. You’re probably about to Google this term, so instead, I’ll define it for you.
Out sickness can refer to the simple feeling of needing to “get out.” Get out of one’s current situation, or in a literal sense, the feeling or desire of wanting to travel elsewhere. It’s that itching feeling you get in the back of your mind when you recognize that you’ve been stationary in one place for far too long. You probably felt this way when you were applying to college, back when you had that desire to go somewhere new, somewhere where no body knew you.
But in my opinion, this is a term that describes that feeling of wanting to get back on the road. It’s that idea of spending hours of travel by plane, train, or car to a new place that you have yet to discover. While some people find comfort in their homesickness, in wanting to be back in a location they know so well and can relax, others feel the need to go anywhere but there.
So why do we feel this way? Are we running from a haunting past or avoiding a confrontation with the people in the places we want to leave? Is this feeling of out sickness all just a therapy to escape our emotional connections to places?
I don’t think so. I think some of us just have that childlike wonder that keeps us curious about what’s out there. Isn’t that why people take gap years or travel abroad – to step into a new area, to get out and explore what’s different than home? And when we reflect back on our life, we don’t think back to those homesick moments where we curl in our bed with our dogs. Sure those are nice memories, but the places our out sickness takes us to are the places in old photographs where we see our happy moments.
There is nothing wrong with being homesick though. It doesn’t make you weak and it doesn’t mean you’re not “adventurous enough,” to want to go home after a rough semester of exams or months of travelling. But we tend to feed into our homesickness more than we do our out sickness, which is when I think we start to become restless. Yet, to have a genuine curiosity about the world around us is something beautiful.
People ask me if I get homesick since I do so much traveling. It’s not that I don’t miss home, sure every now and then I yearn for my real bed and a shower I know will always be warm. Yes, I lived in Ohio for twenty-one years, but I guess I see that as all the more reason for wanting to go out and explore new places. Places. I think it’s the curiosity and wanderlust some people have that pushes them out. It’s why I don’t get homesick and why I’ll never stop. But it is mostly because I yearn to travel outside the city, backwards to the mountains or toward an oceanic horizon. It seems that I found home on the road this summer. I enjoyed that there was not one place I considered home. I felt at home in my apartment in Los Angeles and in other people’s apartments in San Francisco or Colorado. But I mostly felt at home in Washington. I miss everything about that place that I want to call it home, even though I know it still isn’t.
Someday, I’ll find a new place to call home, where I’ll start a family and grow old. But for now, while I’m young, I’d rather follow the whispers of the wind and the changing colors of the leaves. I want to see as much as I can, and I guess I’d rather be out on the road missing home, than sitting in my home, missing the road.