I have reached the dreaded moment I knew was to come. The overwhelming sadness of not being in London anymore. By the end of the semester I felt ready to come home, but now that I am home and I’ve seen my family and gotten back to my “normal” life I am flooded by a feeling of emptiness and longing. People ask me “how was London?” which sounds like a simple enough and expected question, yet it’s the hardest thing I can be asked at this moment. There is no way to put it into words without talking for hours on end. Someone asked me today to name the top 1 thing of my entire semester, and after giving it some hard thought I literally could not come up with an answer. So, I’ve settled for replying, “Amazing, I loved it” even though those words don’t even begin to cover it.
I expected to miss the city I called home for over three months, but I didn’t expect the nostalgia to hit me this soon. I haven’t even been home for two days and I’m experiencing a mix of emotions that are hard to pin down. So yet again, I tried to make sense of my feelings and the best thing I could come up with is viewing my life as a movie. On September 1st when I embarked on my journey pressed pause on my life and lived a different life for a semester, while everyone at home went about as usual. I changed in London. I grew, I travelled, I matured, I experienced the most amazing things I’ve even done in my life, I can say with certainty I’m not the same person that left that September 1st. Coming back home I pressed play on my life, and while everything around me has remained virtually unchanged I have not, which is where I think the melancholy and the feeling of inadequacy comes from. As my cousin very accurately articulated it I’m experiencing “post travel depression” it’s a thing…trust me.
I know I’m not alone in this and that most of my fellow study abroad Londoners agree. We’re all happy to be home and surrounded by family, yet we have this strange feeling in the pit of our stomachs. I take these feelings as a sign of having had a great semester. I’m sure with time these feelings will begin to fade, but never completely, because I truly left a piece of my heart in London.
