Overcoming Homesickness

This week was pretty awesome for me (which may explain why I haven't posted at all... Sorry!). Why? Well, it turns out that for the last two weeks I have been homesick. What's strange is, I didn't even realize I was homesick until this week! It's interesting, with all the emphasis that CIEE put on homesickness and how to get over it, I still didn't realize that it was happening until after it was over. Funny, huh?

The thing is, the homesickness that I experienced didn't resemble at all the kind of homesickness that people talk about in study abroad seminars or on internet travel forums. Before I left, so many people warned me about homesickness; CIEE, my parents, my friends, even my teachers. In fact, everyone who knew that I was going to study abroad lectured me at least once on the difficulties of homesickness and yet, despite all that warning, I didn't even recognize homesickness when it hit me.

For me, homesickness was not like it is often portrayed. I wasn't crying in my bedroom after a day of broken french; I wasn't getting sick from foreign foods; I wasn't even skyping my family constantly (apparently the most common homesickness phenomenon). For me, homesickness was just this muted "I'm not having all that much fun here..." attitude. Acting like a mute-puppy dog (as I mentioned in one of my earlier posts) was definitely a manifestation of my homesickness; I only had energy to follow people around, not really interact with them. Another manifestation of my homesickness was (surprisingly) an overenthusiasm about everything French. It was such a strange combination, my mute-puppy-dog-ness and overenthusiasm. I would be completely silent for 20 minutes, and then excitedy "Ooh!" and "Aah!" over a new combination of bread, cheese and ham. This reverence of everything stereotypically French and dismissal of day-to-day life was what I define as my homesickness.

Luckily for me, my particular strain of homesickness seems to have been shortlived and, for the most part, painless. Like I said, I didn't even notice that this was homesickness until this week when it went away. Throughout this time of homesickness I was convinced I was having a blast! I was seeing new things, meeting new people, and I had friends who didn't burden me with conversation! What wasn't to love? At the time, this seemed great. But what I didn't realize was that I wasn't actually living my life, I wasn't really doing what I meant to do in France, which was to live like me, but in French. And to be me I have to talk, I have to enjoy interactions (rather than just let them wash over me), and I have to live in France as Bella, not as that quiet, generic exchange student.

In my opinion, I think that my homesickness was different because I am different. There's no way that everyone experiences the same kind of homesickness, that wouldn't make sense! Just as we all live differently, deal differently, and intereact differently, we must also experience homesickness differently and it just so happens that my homesickness was in cameo up until the very end. I have to say that I am glad for this, it definitely made my transition easier to have a benign type of homesickness, and it certainly saved me a lot of grief. But, obviously, I'm relieved that it's over. Now that I can actually express my personality  and have the guts to talk like a regular human being, my days go so much better. It's a great feeling to come home and find myself happy not because I had one good conversation in French, but because I had a genuinely good day. And even when I've had a bad day now, it's not because I didn't speak one word, it's because I spoke thousands of words that revealed my personality so well that someone could disagree with me!