What Does it Mean to Feel Homesick?
Feelings of homesickness might be universal but is it an emotion or a state of being? Is it a familiar sense of nostalgia or something unreachable described by the Welsh word, hiraeth?
Looking out to sea. Photo: Tanya Clarke 2017
It seems obvious right? You’re away from home, you feel some loss, even grief and realise you feel homesick. Is that all there is to it? Maybe. I wonder, though, if it might be more complicated than that.
Last week, I thought I was doing okay. I feel settled here. I’m a permanent resident in Canada and now the question of citizenship is coming up. Should we apply? I have become used to driving on the right-hand side of the road and I am less self-conscious about my English accent. I’ve made some friends and live in a beautiful place and I’ve started volunteering. Life is good. I am lucky.
And then, sometimes, it, this feeling, takes me quite by surprise. A wave of longing washes over me. It's a bit like standing in the sea as the tide comes in, standing there until the water is covering your knees, then it starts to reach your thighs, until it threatens with every subsequent wave to push you over. But you don't move unless you must.
When we first moved here I missed old buildings. In North Vancouver, they are few and far between. The house we rented for three years was built in the 1950s. The house we lived in Brighton was built in the 1930s. The house we lived in before that was built in the 1880s. I'm used to old buildings.
Most buildings here, by comparison, are reasonably new and low and functional, with none of the decorative work you might see in the Georgian/Edwardian/Victorian (take your pick) architecture that is so prevalent in Europe. Yesterday I tell a friend the sorry tale of my old art school. How the famous Mackintosh Building, part of Glasgow School of Art, suffered major damage in a fire in 2014. Four years later, during the restoration phase, the building suffered yet more significant fire damage in another major blaze.
She said, to lose buildings like that in Europe must be terrible. The historical loss is huge. Here, she said, as long as everyone is safe, no one really notices.
But the memories are there, I say, and we both nod and agree.
What is Home?
home: a place where one lives; a fixed residence; native land; a place where a thing originates.
I've heard it said that cats are attached to places and dogs are attached to people. For the past 20-odd years we've had cats and for the past 5 years a dog too. Whenever we moved, we were told to keep our cats in the house for at least two weeks while they acclimatised to their new surroundings and made it their territory.
When my husband and I moved from Scotland to England, way back when, we had a cat who we brought with us. We hired a Luton van and drove through the night stopping periodically for petrol and to let out our cat so he could have a pee and a wander around the front seat. We stayed at my husband's parent's house for a few weeks until we found somewhere to live.
One day our cat disappeared. For three weeks we couldn't find him. My husband printed out Lost Cat flyers with a picture and a phone number. Three weeks later we got a call. He was being looked after by the owners of a local pub a couple of miles away. When my husband brought him home he looked fit and healthy as if he’d never been away.
For our old cat, we were not his home. His home was our old flat in Glasgow. I often wonder if he was trying to get back there.
For me, ideas of home feel less tangible than a house. I've moved so many times I don't generally become attached to houses. I’ve never lived in one long enough. But I do become attached to places, to people. It goes without saying that I miss my friends and family back in England and Scotland to a point where if I think about them too much, it's painful. But do I think of them as home?
In 1989 I lived with my dad for a few months in LA. I had a job in a shop on Melrose Avenue called Slightly Crazed which sold an eclectic mix of vintage watches, crockery, jewellery and other decorative objects from earlier decades. It was situated next to another shop called Wanna-Buy-a-Watch which, unsurprisingly, sold watches. I worked with a woman called Julie, an ex-ballet dancer who did her eye makeup perfectly every single day.
I loved that job. I loved the vibrant atmosphere of Melrose. I loved seeing the film stars of the day wandering in and out of the stores and going about their day. Much has changed but I still love visiting. There's a tiny corner in my heart storing old emotions of a place back when I was young and trying to figure out where I wanted to be in the world. Strangely, it does feel like home.
What is Homesickness?
homesickness: an acute longing for one's family or home
I find an old post I wrote in 2017 when we first moved here from England.
"At the end of July, we moved to Vancouver's North Shore on the Pacific North West coast of Canada. That's me, my husband, two daughters and two cats. It was a bit of a scramble to get everything together. Our life was deeply embedded in the UK and it wasn't easy cutting our ties from everything that we knew and found comfortable. And yet the idea of living somewhere new was appealing. An adventure. An opportunity for our girls to experience a different place and learn something else about the world we live in.
We weren't moving to a country where language would be a barrier and our cultural way of life would be very different. I admire people who take themselves completely out of their comfort zone and embark on life experiences that most of us wouldn't even consider. Yet people do, they survive and make the most of things.
We told ourselves and others, 'if it doesn't work out we can always come back'.
Now I'm thinking what does that even mean? When talking about where we used to live I say 'in the UK' rather than 'back home'. If I keep calling the UK 'home' then what does that mean for where we live now?"
And there’s more:
"Now we live in a suburb of North Vancouver, at the foot of where the mountains rest, away from the city, a quiet spectacular gateway to the interior. From the verandah of our house, we can look out over the tops of trees, and houses and further out across the bay to downtown. It's a breathtaking view.
Over the summer wildfire smoke, drifts across the city, shrouding everywhere in a dusty haze. For two weeks it settles in the air. I read that the particulate matter in the air causes the blue light to scatter, letting the longer wavelength red light shine through. It gives everywhere an apocalyptic aura.
Everything is strangely unfamiliar. It takes me hours to shop in the supermarket. I travel up and down the aisles, scanning the shelves, searching for items on my list, and stopping periodically to marvel at tubs of ice cream that resemble small buckets. Coffee can be served to you in a cup so big you could swim in it.
I miss Marmite, Walker's crisps and proper sausages. I've lost count of how many times I've googled 'What is all-purpose flour?' And, while you're here, why measure everything in cups?"
The Pain of Nostos
Do you have an iPhone? Do you enjoy the Memories feature? The Photos app selects a number of your images and edits them into a ‘curated collection’. As the app recognises people, places and events, it can gather them together into a Memory adding some music too. Just for that sentimental mood. I don't like it much. It reminds me of those adverts on the telly where an entire life story is played out from birth to death in an effort to sell you a 'lifestyle' embodied by a new sofa or a stylish kitchen. I'd rather look through photos at my own pace when my emotions won't catch me unaware.
nostalgia: a combination of the Greek words nostos, a 'return home', and algos, 'pain'. Its first meaning was acute homesickness.
“Nostalgia itself was coined in 1688 by the Swiss physician Johannes Hofer, who introduced nostalgia or mal du pays as alternative names for the condition known as mal du Suisse. This was a sickness observed amongst Swiss mercenaries who, while fighting in the lowlands of Europe, yearned for their native mountains. Symptoms were not just psychological: this particular brand of homesickness was believed to include fevers, abdominal pain, fainting, vomiting, and even death.”
So nostalgic feelings can be painful. Literally painful. So maybe when I'm thinking about my friends and family in the UK, it’s nostalgia I'm feeling.
But this isn't the first time I've written about nostalgia and photography. In The Kodak Carousel, I wrote about Mad Men’s Don Draper and his pitch to Kodak. He talks about nostalgia and uses it to sell his idea. There's more than a passing resemblance to the iPhone's Memories function here.
“Teddy told me that in Greek ‘nostalgia’ literally means the pain from an old wound. It’s a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone.
This device isn’t a spaceship. It’s a time machine.
It goes backwards, and forwards. It takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It’s not called The Wheel. It’s called The Carousel. It lets us travel the way a child travels. Round and around and back home again to a place where we know we are loved.”
When You Return
Can you only feel homesick if you're absent from home? Can you be home and still feel homesick?
hiraeth [Welsh: hi-ry-eth]: a deep nostalgia for home.
“There is a kind of homesickness that lingers even when you return. It is a call as much to your spiritual as your physical home, which may never quite be found. This nostalgia for the unreachable, for the loss of love and home, is known in Welsh as hiraeth. A word with Celtic roots, it is an ancient concept recorded as early as the sixth century, articulating both incompleteness and the longing for something now gone, or for what could have been.”
My only connection with Wales is a pony trekking trip I went on aged about 9. I have no idea what possessed me to think this was a good idea. I had no previous experience riding a horse and honestly didn't gain a lot over the week I was away. My favourite part of the whole holiday was a day out at Barry Island Pleasure Park. Not a pony to be seen.
But I've never heard this word - an old Celtic Welsh word which is difficult to translate fully into English as if the very feelings of homesickness are impossible in themselves to label. Sometimes words, even in the most skilled of hands, are not enough.
Lily Crossley-Baxter in her article The Untranslatable Word That Connects Wales describes hiareth as: a blend of homesickness, nostalgia and longing, "hiraeth" is a pull on the heart that conveys a distinct feeling of missing something irretrievably lost.
Her article is a wonderful read, a poetic effort to try and describe what hiraeth means.
“While Wales is a place easily returned to, I know it’s not really the harbourside I crave or the beautiful views. What I miss is the unique sense of being home, perhaps in a way that – years later, with friends scattered and my family living elsewhere – is now unattainable, but nonetheless where I want to be.”
Interestingly as I type the word, hiraeth, Grammarly wants to correct it to ‘hearth’. Oh my. Another magical thing! My dictionary describes hearth as 1. the floor of a fireplace. 2. the home. [Old English] I’m no expert in language, least of all the language I’m supposed to speak fluently but hiraeth and hearth might have similar origins. If hiraeth describes an unattainable sense of home, hearth is the floor of the fireplace - the fireplace being, traditionally, the heart of a home. The hearth is the very place we find warmth, where we plant our feet.
Is This Where You Belong?
Perhaps the opposite to hiraeth is homefulness which sounds like a made-up word but does exist in An Emotional Dictionary. As its author Susie Dent is a highly respected lexicographer (a word which for some reason I struggle to say easily…) AND, more importantly, is famous for presenting Dictionary Corner in Countdown, a long-running favourite show of daytime telly in the UK, I am not about to argue. If we have homelessness then homefulness must be true.
homefulness: filled with a sense of belonging.
“In July 1841, the poet John Clare escaped from High Beech asylum in Epping Forest, desperate to get home to his beloved Mary Joyce. He walked for days with broken shoes, subsisting only on grass from the verges. When utterly exhausted, he reached the point where the road forks to Peterborough, he felt a renewed sense of vitality and later recalled, “I felt myself in home’s way.” The writer Iain Sinclair, retracing Clare’s journey in his 2005 book Edge of the Orison, used the little-known word ‘homefulness’ to describe Clare’s feeling at exactly this point - a moment when he became full of the feeling of home.”
Describing a homeless person as ‘lacking a home’ feels inadequate for what’s at stake. If a home is lost through war or addiction or financial ruin we also lose something even greater. We lose a sense of belonging. People will ignore you, treat you poorly as if you shouldn’t be there. A job becomes difficult to get when you have no fixed address. A lack of trust takes hold when someone says they have no home.
Our sense of home, of belonging is embedded in us. We need it. When we are able to call a place our home, we give it something. Our life, our history, our love.
Ah! Of course, we fill it with homefulness.
Until next time.
