Getting past homesickness
Getting past homesickness
From out-of-state students to recent moves, here are tips to keep ‘home’ close to your heart
Four of my 38 years were spent living in two other states, and I was at war with my mother about making sure I went to an out-of-state university. While she wouldn’t admit it until months later, she just really knew she’d miss me. But I wanted to go to a university that didn’t feel like High School 2.0. I’d already done that, going from elementary school to high school with some of the same people. Some people need familiarity to enjoy themselves. I’m on both extremes. I either want to be around really close friends and family or complete strangers — without any in-between.
Although I scowl at the idea of being called a Yooper, I lived in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan for two years. I also wasn’t particularly thrilled with referring to Missouri as “home” — even though my father’s side of the family is from St. Louis. For me, Chicago will always be home. As much as I wanted to be as far away from it as possible, there were moments when I grew homesick. The Windy City has that magnetic pull that warms my heart no matter where I go, from Missouri to Maui.
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I fully understood why my older brother got a tattoo of the Chicago skyline before he followed his wife and two sons off to Arizona to permanently live. After all, the man took more than a year to finally give in. He is South Side Chicago born and bred, and he just really didn’t want to leave but knew he wanted to be with his family. So he took a piece of Chicago with him, and I understood.
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Out-of-state students are in a strange situation with the spread of coronavirus. They’re either staying put in their new “homes” to avoid spreading the outbreak to older relatives, or they came running home and gave up off-campus apartments and college life. Then there are those business travelers and employees who made the decision to move to another state for a new job, having not a clue that the late doctor Li Wenliang’s prediction was far more accurate than anticipated. There’s also a third group of people — those who are socially isolated but just miss the bit of “normalcy” in their everyday trips to work, school or their social lives.