home-sickness and home-recovery

and the parts in the middle

this week’s Thought (singular)

delighted at the variety in curtains. dark curtains. heavy curtains. sheer curtains. blinds. and so on

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a very warm welcome to all new readers. i love new readers so much that whenever i get an email about a new reader, i manifest that they have That conversation with whoever they have to. thank you for joining us. may you gain the courage to casually bring up whatever topic needs to be tackled and have a healthy and productive discussion about it.

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hi

let’s get this obligatory first part over with. i talk a lot about home here. specifically about a) the delight and comfort of houses, b) the way home can be used as a measurement for growth, c) the variety in the concept of home itself as people, places, things, feelings, and most recently, d) how to make visits home last longer. in the middle of all these fairly winding topics, it’s shocking that i haven’t dusted off and released the one about homesickness that’s been sitting in my drafts for months now.

at the time of writing this, i’m 12-ish hours away from flying back home – for good this time – after six months of living in a different city and only doing quick visits. the experience has been exhaustively (and exhaustingly) covered in this newsletter. but now, as i’m staring down the barrel of a loaded at-home-for-the-foreseeable-future gun, my emotions are…more complicated than i expected them to be. so i thought i’d finally take the tarp off that homesickness draft, spruce it up a bit, and try to wrangle some sense out of whatever i’m feeling right now.

as a side note, i do think that throughout this storm-in-a-teacup situation, a very comforting thought has been that i don’t have to do anything as such with these emotions. it isn’t at all easy to implement, but i try to reiterate to myself that it is enough to just let the feelings be, and that feeling them is what i mean when i say i want to deal with them. i think i was at least partly successful. but now, onward!

i spent the last six months thinking about home, pining for home, taking every opportunity to talk about home, that i didn’t realise that i was building a home here. it’s a bittersweet thought. i wish i had been present for the construction. i wish i had taken the opportunity to consciously leave traces of myself in the house and in the city – my mug in the kitchen, my charger in the living room, my tiny smiles at the strangers on the train that smiled back every morning. all these things happened (sweet), but i do not feel like i did them (bitter). the life i’ve set up here, with all the tears and sweat and dourness and all the excitement and delight and newness, seems like it’s passed me by. my hands aren’t stained with the cement, but the building is erect. i just never saw it in progress.

i want to say i don’t regret the half-year that’s just passed, but that would be a reductive statement. i’ve learnt too much, grown too much, experienced too much to claim anything else point-blank, but growing pains…pain. i’ve felt the skin tear during this metamorphosis too starkly to fully appreciate the final stage i’m at. hopefully, with time, this will change. a more accurate wording of the whole regret thing would be that i am still smarting from the difficulty to fully comprehend the growth, but on some level, recognise that the experience has changed me for the better.

i do have an idealised version of home in my brain. every time i gloomily remembered bangalore, the good parts were what i thought about and the messy parts disappeared in my nostalgia. every time i had a Big Sadness, the foremost thought in my mind was always ‘i wouldn’t feel this way if i were at home’. to my down-in-the-dumps self, the dumps was always directly related to where i physically was, and it logically followed that if i were at home, the dumps would just…cease to exist. i think the homesickness was so magnified that every negative emotion was tainted with it so it was easy to ignore the negative emotion itself. but now, in the imminent absence of homesickness, you can see why it might be daunting to face the things that have been conveniently masked. will it be as good as i remember it? will the excuses that i’ve used in this city for my loneliness hold up in that one? how will it be different, now that i’m different? i desperately missed the home that existed six months ago, but can i even fit in that same home the same way now? what can i expect and what can i predict?

i had to strongly reckon with the idea that i was ‘running away’ by going home. that i wasn’t strong enough to face the difficulties here and needed to crawl back with my tail between my legs after admitting defeat. but now, i see that that’s all a little stupid. why is it cowardice to seek comfort? i don’t want to crow about the merit i’ve obtained from the struggle, because i don’t think there’s any to speak of.

tentatively, i am starting to acknowledge that there are things i will miss about mumbai. i spent so long refusing to see it as my home (or blind to the fact that it had become a home), that it’s difficult to see it in perspective. difficult to arrive at the realisation that i spent a sizeable chunk of time here, worked here, explored here, lived here and that’s no small thing. i’ll miss the feeling of relative safety on crowded roads late at night. i’ll miss the way the local is a lifeline, the way i’ve picked up on the tiny habits of my fellow commuters that i ran into everyday. i’ll miss the routine of the transit to office - my spot in the metro that i rushed to get, the mad dash to the train station, the exact same seat on the exact same bench on the platform, the long walk back to the local after work, the lift operator who always asked me how my day went. it’s odd to feel nostalgia for a place you didn’t even fully register you were staying at, but i manage to do it anyhow.

this one has been a mess, but a very heartfelt one. it was mostly to make sense of a lot of things, and i think it helped sort out the complexity of the emotions i was experiencing. moving out of a loving home is a weird experience, filled with growth and pain and excitement. i never though homesickness would be so huge, would feel like this immovable weight on my chest that dragged me down, but it did. and i also never expected it to sometimes be small, so small, like a kitten purring in your lap. i suppose that’s a good lesson as i move back, that whatever i expect, it’s probably going to not be that. it’s probably going to be somewhere in the middle, sometimes difficult and sometimes easy.

edit (added after reaching home) – i am so glad to be back.

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A Picture!

a very funny ikea light display

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this week’s Song

Onakka Munthiri by Hesham Abdul Wahab and Divya Vineeth

find all shared songs here.

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thank you for reading, and see you next week <3

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