Homesickness: People say you get over it after a few years of being an expat. I call bull$h*t.
It doesn’t.
I think with time we just grow more numb to the memory of home. It’s glazed over and pushed aside for everyday ups and downs of life: work, dinners with friends, kids, dates, travel.
The hardest part of coming home is seeing what you’re missing.
SMACK.
It hits you right in the face like a wave of summer heat: moms garlic flavored cooking, morning coffee with dad, hours of talking with your best friend passing by in what seems like mere seconds. I am never as homesick as when I am home.
We have such a wonderful life in Paris, I’m working with incredible clients and am creatively unbridled- something I never felt working in NYC. But is it possible to fulfill your soul’s purpose in while simultaneously having half your heart across an ocean?
I just don’t know.
They say that home is where your heart is, but what happens when that’s not only one place?
My mom sent me something she wrote at the airport right after I left on Monday night, she said, “I guess the sadness is just knowing that I’ve been shaken up a bit by her presence but she won’t be around for a while to see its affect. No one really knows how we influence each other and to what degree. We just know it happens.”
Reading what she wrote makes me tear up, because it’s exactly that: Like ripples in the water, our presence effects much more than what we originally touch.
