Let’s Talk About Going Back To School Emotions
When you’re away from home attending college — be that a different city or a new country entirely — going back home for vacations comes with ups and downs of emotions. Unless you’re an hour or so away from home and can drive back every weekend, home visits can weigh on you. While it’s important to give yourself a break and make space for loved ones, it’s not always as refreshing. At times, you come back to school more disorientated than you might think.
For international students (or students who live significantly far away from home), going back home for a vacation takes a lot of preparing and patience. This is primarily because we don’t get to drive back home every long weekend we get, but rather have to time it according to the duration of winter and summer breaks, ensuring that we’re upholding the requirements and restrictions of our visa, and the availability of the cheapest flight. This trip takes months to sort out and finalize, and with it comes the initial romanticization and imagining reuniting with our loved ones, followed by the same crippling homesickness that we spend too much time to overcome.
The excitement of going back
When you start packing to go back home, you’re thrilled to see your friends and family. You’re thrilled to relive all the moments you’ve missed out on and more importantly, you’re looking forward to having a good time and not worrying about deadlines. Receiving phone calls and messages from people back home asking to meet you and making plans makes you romanticize and expect more from your trip. At times, you might even unconsciously expect that nothing will go wrong, everything will go the way you want because you’re the special, temporary individual in this situation. It’s very natural not to entertain the ideas of conflicts and arguments that might make your trip sour.
For those of us who stay in a different country, the invisible expectation and pressure of making sure everything goes well takes over easily without any hesitation. We imagine that everyone is excited to see us and that the 32-hour plane ride is merely a transition into familiarity.
The adjustment back home
International students have an unstable sense of home. When living abroad, we try to bring elements of home closer to us to recreate that feeling. However, when we actually get to go back home, it doesn’t feel like home — the air, the food, the people, the lack of comfort and security — something feels off and yet we can’t put our finger on it. Our room doesn’t feel like our room anymore and we quickly realize that we can’t settle in. We spend a lot of time adjusting to the new environment, culture, people, food, social interactions and such, and it’s as though the process of adjustment and assimilation has begun all over again. Coming back home, we find ourselves struggling to unlearn everything we’ve learned abroad because it’s ‘weird’ or ‘awkward’ or ‘inappropriate’.
Speaking for myself, I spent my winter in my home country, Bangladesh, after having stayed in New York for about 8 months. I was indeed excited to go back, but the moment I stepped foot outside the airport, I was reminded why I felt. Every moment I spent during this vacation, I kept thinking, “X more days till I’m back to my school routine”.
Despite how you might feel about going back home for long vacations, after a week or so you begin to settle in — the jetlag passes and you get back into the routine of waking up and making spontaneous plans, not worrying about checking the online classroom portals. However, every once in a while, you’re reminded just of how momentary this is and in the back of your mind, you know that the temporariness of this lifestyle is what makes it so desirable. Evidently, if you spend long enough time on this break, things are likely to unfurl. Remember, it’s been months and everyone has a lot they want to catch you up on and have a lot to say to you. It can be daunting, especially when you’ve lived on your own and have had only yourself to cater to for the last few months.
Back to school
As the days go on, you begin receiving ‘back to school’ emails and emails from faculty with the course syllabus and expected reading. Just like that, the trip ends. Whether or not you’ve had a good time, the feeling of homesickness again sinks in as you head to the airport to embark on your 32-hour flight back to where you were. You begin to regret ever going back home because you realize that you just reset your homesickness, one that you worked your first few weeks coping with and thought you successfully overcame.
Heading back to school after any vacation is hard. Readjusting to the monotonous class schedules and at times, sacrificing your social life to make sure you’re on top of your studies is always a challenging change. It takes a couple of days to readjust to the self-dependent mindset and get back into the habit of cooking your own food, doing your own laundry, managing your own finances, taking care of yourself when you’re sick and figuring things out on your own. Phone calls with people back home again become a treat and something that requires planning, and sometimes you forget that ‘back home’ still exists.
There’s a saying that home is where you make it. As an international student myself, I say it’s difficult to make your own home when you’re trying to build and figure out your own life. However, this is true for all individuals and is not a unique experience to international students. Navigating these emotions and accepting (for many of us) that home is not where it once used to be, is confusing and heartbreaking. It’s important to remember that just because right now everything feels afloat and messy, it won’t always be like that. Yes, you yourself have to make it as such and you’ll fail multiple times. But people struggle for years, if not decades, to achieve what they desire for themselves and this is no different. Worst case scenario, your visa runs out and you have to take a few steps back or go another route. Nevertheless, not knowing where home is isn’t the end of the world and once you’ve overcome failure and doubt, and learned to let go, it gets easier.
Written by Puja Sarkar, Press & Written Media team
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