I feel nauseous. My eyes throb. My stomach churns. I am on edge, constantly. I’m torn away from the person I want to be, the one with realised dreams, a worn map in her back pocket and piles of dog-eared notebooks brimming with ticked off bucket lists and tales of adventure scribbled within their pages. But this shiny version of me is difficult to get to, always appearing out of reach no matter how far I push, pitted against the tempting thought that I could stop this instant and settle, stay as I am now, slow right down the self development and move home, get a real job. I have tormented myself long enough. I am miserable. I want to quit. It’s too hard. These symptoms, I have discovered, have a name. Collectively they are known as homesickness, and I despise it.
It manifests itself as an illness, one that is rarely eradicated but can be contained to a low hum whirring constantly in the back of your mind. It makes you feel weak. It tempts you often, especially when you are feeling vulnerable or having a particularly rough day. It whispers in your ear: pack it all in, just go home. Life’s too short to struggle, to fail. It could all be so much easier.
I’ve nearly caved on several occasions. I’ve nearly booked that flight, packed that bag. How easy it would be to slot right back in to my old familiar world with my family steadfast around me, my old friends, ways and customs that are not alien to me, to a country I know inside out.
Homesickness, I have succumbed to your wrath before. And here you are again after all my years away, after all I’ve learned. You don’t care. Here you sit before me, beckoning me once more. How do I resist your charm, as you dredge up those cherished images imprinted in my mind’s eye. Dancing images of my beloved family decorating the Christmas tree beside the fire, my friends lining up the shots of tequila on a mahogany bar counter.
You who knows all my secrets, you who lives within me, poisoning my enjoyment of the here and now… why do you torment me? This time I cannot let you overcome me. For I know, that if I go home nothing will have changed. My country holds nothing for me anymore. No career awaits me there. It has failed me.
Yet you persist. You make me forget the reasons why I cannot go back. You blur my memory of that last time home, when I noticed that real life there is not the same as going on holiday home, everyday is not like it is during Christmas time.
It makes me forget that all my people there have their own lives now with careers and friends, a life without me. It was my decision to give all of that up and now I cannot have it back. I have to remember that I chose this path and I was warned beforehand that I would struggle. That at times I would detest it, wrapped in loneliness, failing hard and often until I almost reached breaking point.
It is too late for me to turn back now, I’ve ventured too far. I must be tough. I must endure. I must learn to savor you, for after all aren’t you really a beautiful thing? Am I not the lucky one to have such a place to call home? A place with people that it hurts this much to be away from? How many can say the same?
I must push forward to see what tomorrow brings, to not just dream it but to live out my adventures in real time, to make them proud of me. And hope that when I’m ready, that they will be there waiting. When I finally find what it is that I am searching for and I am ready to return. It may not be for many years but eventually I will walk back into that little town and tuck my suitcase away up in the attic. When the day has come that I am truly content with the person I am, I will race up the driveway of my childhood into my mammy’s arms, and what a day of celebration it will be. For no more will I feel restless or lacking, for no more will I wonder what if, or whisper to the TV screen I wish I could do that, or I wish I could be like that. For I will finally be satisfied.
Until then, I trudge on shifting rapidly between moments of wonder and moments of terror. Failing and learning all the time. Murmuring under my breath when I feel down… I am one of the lucky ones. I am one of the lucky ones…
Orla O Muiri is a 24-year-old freelance journalist/videographer living in Australia. She tweets @orlaomuiriand blogs at orlaomuiri1.wordpress.com.
