This week was one of those weeks where I didn’t have anything concrete planned for a blog post. I usually have something simmering in the back of my mind during the week and type it out into something that sorta resembles a blog post on Saturday night and hit publish on Sunday. However, this week was just a blur and I didn’t have any brooding moments or epiphanies to write about. But, I did want to write about something that I’ve been thinking about a lot recently.

I like to think that I’m a pretty emotionally aware person; I’m an introvert at heart and I like my time alone to think and reflect on different things going on in my life or around me. Something that I’ve been doing a lot recently is comparing right now to this time last year. It’s not that I’m stuck in the past or anything, but it’s just that there’s such a stark contrast between this year and last year. Last year was my first year ever living away from home and it was a lot – I was incredibly homesick. Now, when I think back to last year it’s like I’m thinking of a completely different life. So much has changed between then and now and it seems like all of that change happened in much longer than just a year.

This year is mostly different in the fact that I’m so much more comfortable out here in DC and I don’t feel that overwhelming sense of homesickness anymore. But I do still miss home and I was trying to come up with a new word that represents that feeling. Not homesickness… but maybe a sense of nostalgia for home and those experiences?

What exactly do I mean by that? It’s not like homesickness, I don’t sit in my room feeling sad because I want to go home, but sometimes I’ll have a day where I’m sitting there thinking “hmm it would be pretty nice to be back home right now.” Sometimes on a rainy day in DC I’ll be thinking about being at home in London all cozy and looking out the window at the rain. Sometimes on a sweltering hot and humid day in DC I’ll wish I was back in Dubai on walk soaking up the sun. It’s a much more passive feeling that a sudden jolt of homesickness; something that’s more of a yearning for a moment in time rather than a need to suddenly escape my life out here and run home.

I guess normal people would just call it missing home, but I have a blog about this kind of stuff so I like to overcomplicate it into a fancy idea. I guess it’s just something that I didn’t think about. Last year, the feeling of homesickness was so overwhelming that I didn’t really think about what the next step in the journey would be. I didn’t think about the fact that you don’t go from feeling homesickness to feeling completely normal and at home. I think I’m still in this point of the journey where I miss home and some days I want to be back home but just because I miss it, not because I’m unhappy out here.

I’m lucky in that I get to go home during the holidays. It’s nice to have those small trips to look forward to so I can feel like I can still experience the parts of home that I miss once in a while. I’ll be interested to see how this pans out and if you ever fully stop missing or feeling nostalgic for those moments at home. Let me know in the comments what you think!

See you next week!