Homesick blues 2

In my last post – with reference to my recent minor bout of homesickness – I mentioned that my first instinct was to fire up the InterWebNet to do some research. This turns out to have been a smart move and one that I would definitely recommend to others who find themselves in a similar state.

Here’s why:

The first thing that the sufferer will learn is that he or she is not alone. Not by a long chalk! Indeed, it is really quite startling – until one really thinks about it – quite how much web-based material there is on the subject. This boon provides assistance in a number of ways:

• It is always comforting to discover that the unexpectedly painful emotions that you are suffering are in fact really very common. They won’t necessarily hurt less for being so but it can help considerably to feel less alone in your discomfort.
• Where there are numbers there is social interaction. The InterWebNet abounds with fora to which you can add your voice and on which you can recount your experience. This will quite likely engender a sympathetic response from others who have ‘been there – suffered that’.
• There is much useful information online both as to the nature of homesickness, and regarding helpful hints for mitigating the effects thereof. Not surprisingly, doing some research into the nature of homesickness does indeed itself prove to be one of the useful strategies for coping.
• The number of blogs addressing the issue of homesickness is illustrative of yet another coping stategy – that of recording your emotional turmoil as a way of ‘taming the beast’ – as it were…

…which is – after all – exactly what I am doing here.

The InterWebNet provides further assistance. Its use as a communication tool – by means of emails, social media, Skype, messaging and so forth – as well as in providing resources such as Steetview or websites to enable one to virtually revisit the ‘motherland’, means that we now have at our fingertips unprecedented power to mitigate the agonies of much missed people and places. No – it’s not the same as actually being there, but goodness knows how previous generations managed without these amazing tools.

For me the most useful thing was discovering more about the nature of the beast itself. I am not going to give you a complete guided tour of the resources available online as you can easily make a list to your own specification using Google (or an alternative search engine of your choice). I am going to reference a couple of thoughts that I discovered that were particularly relevant in my case.

In the interests of keeping things in handily bite-sized chunks, however, I will once again flow over into yet another post…