Did you experience home sickness when you moved from home? How did you deal with it?
Did you experience home sickness when you moved from home? How did you deal with it?
r/AskWomen
Did you experience home sickness when you moved from home? How did you deal with it?
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Not when I moved away at 24 from where I grew up, no. Which is weird for me because I get intensely attached to places and I prefer things to always stay the same and moving often feels traumatic to me, but in that case I just wanted to leave a place that had a lot of negative memories in from my teens onward. I love the city I moved to and I was excited to move there. However, when I had to leave it for a couple years when I was 30-31ish for practical reasons… intense homesickness. It’s almost all I could think about a lot of the time, I felt lost and empty, and my depression was perhaps the worst I’ve ever experienced (and I started struggling with depression around the age of 11). So much grief. I dealt with it by moving back eventually. The business my ex-husband owned in the city we moved to wasn’t doing that well so he needed to close it anyway and we had no logical reason to stay there or move anywhere different, so we came back. Been here again since 2016. Currently I’m afraid I’ll have to move away again once my fiancé finds a job. We’re in a midsize city in Canada, about an hour from a very large city, and he moved here from the UK last autumn and it’s quite possible he’ll end up finding something that’s… not here. And commuting can be a pain in the arse and not very practical.
Anyway, where I grew up doesn’t feel like home, but the place I moved to in my 20s really does and I just want to stay here for good. The homesickness destroyed me last time.
I’m homesick for the people I left behind but not the place. I try to visit once or twice a year, but I keep in touch with my family and friends through Discord or WhatsApp so that we’re still in each others lives.
I visited for Easter, and that really solidified that it’s not the country/place that I miss, but the people (and pets) there.
I got a kitty, i decorated it how i like it, i started being more creative
I left home at 18 and I really did at first. I missed my family and friends and my old life. Stuff that helped – throwing myself into my new life head first. Finding groups on social media specifically geared for meeting new people and making friends. Finding things (furniture/decorations) for my new place that made it feel like my space. Going for walks to get my bearings in a new city and to find beautiful places where I wanted to spend time. Scheduling time to phone people from home and catch up with them. And working hard to achieve the things I’d set out to achieve when I moved away. It was hard and I definitely had some ugly cries and moments where I wondered if I’d made a mistake. But being honest with other people also helped me deal with that. Even new friends will get it if you say ‘you know I never thought I’d feel homesick but I do’. People can be really kind. And honestly I think the people I met were a huge part of how I dealt with it
Definitely felt it. First night alone hit hard. Room was too quiet, food didn’t taste the same. I just let myself feel it, called home when I needed to and tried to build a new routine. It slowly got better.
Absolutely, and I was 35 when I moved away. It was rough for a bit. My little family of 3 moved away from everyone we knew to move 700 miles away where we knew no one. I wouldn’t change things at all. At no point do I want to move back, I just miss my people and the food.
I dealt with it poorly for a while. Instead of calling a lot, I did the opposite because talking to them made me miss them even more. I just kind of isolated myself for a while till my brain was ready to accept that this is how thi gs are now.
Honestly, homesickness nearly broke me for almost a year when I moved to London. It felt like someone had died and was such a shock to my system that I almost went to therapy over it.
Basically, the only things that worked were getting out there with people I already knew, forcing myself to socialise (when all I wanted to do was cry in bed), and time. Now I’m very happy here, but it took a lot of struggle to get there.
I didn’t feel homesick at first because I was excited and busy with the adrenaline of the move. It didn’t hit me until about a month later when I was exhausted from work and came home to an empty, quiet place with no food because I hadn’t prepared anything yet.
I just miss my parents and sometimes the comfort of that home. But I have my own home and my own new life.
I moved out many times, for school or work assignment. Every time I had the knowledge that after X time, I would be back there. It’s different now, and sometimes when it hits me I feel down. But I’m excited for this new life and it overpowers all the negative.
That doesn’t stop me from calling them daily.
I did not at all. I never hated where I was from (Netherlands) but living abroad for five years has been such an amazing experience for me.
The problem was when I moved back. I moved to the USA (Arizona) at an age when a lot of people want to settle down… and that’s what I did. I spent five years building a steady life. I had a fantastic job, wonderful friends, we were in such a fun city with so many activities and restaurants that I just felt lucky to be there every day. Arizona has the added bonus of beautiful nature that we simply don’t have at all in my home country.
My husband and I moved back to Europe last summer and against our expectations, we both feel “home sick” to that wonderful place we lived for the past five years. I loved our life there and it doesn’t help that my new job isn’t working out that well (working on that). We weirdly do not feel at home in our home country now, despite it being almost a year now. I realized recently that I am actually going through some kind of grief over the loss of the life we had.
Although with everything happening in the USA at the moment, I feel like, rationally, we got out just in time. We know people in similar situations as ours that lost their visa or held at the airport for hours or have other problems that would affect us too if we were still there. Last year I thought at some point, we might want to go back to Arizona. Right now, I don’t think that’s an option anymore. So I am at least grateful for the fun times we had. And that’s how I deal with the “homesickness” I experience sometimes. I tell myself that the life we had in Arizona doesn’t exist anymore.
A bit, but my place is only 15 minutes from my home, so I stopped in at least once a week (or more when I was feeling particularly homesick). But then my home got sold and my family moved hours away. I’ve never been lonelier and never missed my home more. It hurts to think that I’ll never have that again.
Personally, I did not. I mean, I had feelings of “I miss mom,” “looking forward to this weekend when I go home,” etc. but I was never really sad to be gone.
My parents were extremely overprotective, and college was my first taste of independence.