(Not?) Experiencing Homesickness While Traveling

traveler woman just arrived to destination with her suitcase

Have you ever traveled someplace you were really excited about and then found yourself feeling homesick? Homesickeness is something normal that lots of travelers experience, but it’s pretty foreign to me. Sure, I’ve had a desire to go back to places I’ve visited, but I’ve never felt homesick while traveling – even when I’ve traveled alone. I’m that rare creature that enjoys solitude and needs be on the move. Being home is counter-intuitive for me.

None of this is to say that I don’t love or miss my family, but when I’m away from home, I get into this different mindset. I focus on where I am at that moment and try to soak it all in. Sometimes I don’t even talk to people back home for several days. It upsets them, but it’s in no way a reflection of my affection for them. I just can’t be in two places at once.

Is that strange? Plenty of people think so. When I moved away for college, my parents would sometimes ask if I “missed home.” I never did, and again, it wasn’t because I had a miserable home or I didn’t love my family. It was because my focus was entirely on where I was in the moment, giving me no time to long for anyplace else. Even when I went on a 3-day school trip at 9 years old and all the other kids spent the nights crying in their beds, I was happy as a clam. I soaked in the experience and then went back home happy and excited to share it with the people who weren’t there with me.

I read an article on CNN a while ago about the psychology of homesickness. The article defined is as “distress and functional impairment caused by an actual or anticipated separation from home and attachment objects such as parents.” I thought about this for a while and why it doesn’t apply to me. I think it’s because of my experience growing up.

I was born in Afghanistan during a civil war and at the age of two, my parents packed up very few of their belongings and we moved to Poland. Then Germany. Then, at 10 years old we settled in the U.S.. Initially, I longed for our old life in Germany. Everything was different in the U.S. – the grocery stores were huge, people bought unhealthy foods in buckets, the streets were massive yet congested, and getting anywhere required driving. Everything was too big and impersonal and it took me a long time to get used to it (not to mention the language barrier).

But I think that experience, paired with my upbringing which was culturally distinct from the society at large, made me feel less attached to places and more flexible to change. In a post-9/11 world, I’ve felt like an outsider living in the U.S. and I I haven’t felt “at home” anywhere except in Afghanistan. Going to a strange place and getting used to new languages and norms doesn’t bother me much. Being an outsider someplace else is not unnerving because I’m used to it. And because this change is temporary, it’s an oddly comforting feeling for me. I don’t miss what’s “back home” because it isn’t home. And feeling temporarily out of place is easier to deal with than feeling permanently out of place.

That got way deeper than I had intended, but I want to hear from you: Do you ever get homesick while traveling? How do you deal with it?

[Photo: Shutterstock]