Feeling homesick when you’re thrust into a new environment is an extremely common feeling. But is it possible to feel that way even when you haven’t left home?
A woman in her 20s who posted on the British parenting forum Mumsnet thought so. She explained that, despite living in her childhood home with her parents, siblings, and dog, she still had a consistent sense of being homesick. The peculiar feeling turned out to be more common than she expected, with multiple languages having a word for it.
A young woman wondered about the ‘sad and mournful feeling’ of wanting to go home, despite already being home.
“I find myself saying to myself, ‘I want to go home,’ even when I’m sitting at home,” she explained. “Does anyone else experience this? There’s this sad, mournful longing for ‘home,’ but I’m already at home.”
Many people left comments assuring the woman that she was not alone and that they, too, experienced a similar sensation. One person on the thread described the feeling as “a pining, yearning quality to a longing for home that can leave a person quite unsettled.”
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Others tried to decipher where this woman’s feelings were coming from. “I suspect it’s a yearning for your own home, your own space, to spread your wings into adulthood and be able to make a space your own, have freedom, autonomy, and independence,” said one person.
Another person wondered if she had a “longing to feel safe or happy when you feel the opposite.” The young woman responded, saying, “I don’t think that it’s related to wanting my own home; it’s not even really about the house itself, just a feeling.” She recalled she had felt that way since her childhood.
Typical homesickness is uncomfortable but understandable, unlike what this woman feels.
In a 2007 research paper published in The American Academy of Pediatrics journal, Christopher Thurber and Edward Walton defined homesickness as “distress and functional impairment caused by an actual or anticipated separation from home and attachment objects such as parents.”
Feeling homesick is not something you can just easily get over. Thurber and Walton further noted that “severe homesickness may be best classified as adjustment disorder with mixed anxiety and depressed mood.”
Homesickness manifests in different ways for different people, with some feeling physical symptoms in addition to emotional ones. This still didn’t fully explain what this woman was feeling in particular, though.
The feeling of being homesick at home spans cultures, and can be described using the Welsh word ‘hiraeth’ and the Portuguese word ‘saudade.’
One person on Mumsnet introduced a cultural concept from Wales into the conversation, noting that the woman’s sense of homesickness sounded like the untranslatable Welsh word “hiraeth.” The word “hiraeth” is related to a feeling of nostalgia, yet it also holds a sense of irretrievable loss, a melancholic longing for something that can’t be found.
Someone else shared their own experience with the feeling, saying, “The Portuguese call it ‘saudade.’ It’s a melancholic longing for another time or place or person, a feeling of homesickness.”
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“I get it a lot,” they revealed. “I want to go back to my childhood home. But I can never go back, because not only is it not the same, I’m not the same person.”
Their bittersweet comment touches on an intangible longing that perhaps unites us all. To be human is to seek our place in the world. We want to feel rooted. We want to feel like we belong.
While there might not be a distinct answer or any exact reason for this woman’s intangible sense of feeling out of place, the fact that so many others experience the feeling, too, means that ultimately, she’s not alone.
Alexandra Blogier, MFA, is a writer who covers psychology, social issues, relationships, self-help topics, and human interest stories.
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