Social Media, You’re Making Me Homesick

Overthinking It
Jul 30, 2017 · 5 min read
Photo by Jordan McQueen on Unsplash

I find myself feeling strangely homesick for my life back in Manila, which is the very last thing I expected to feel after 16 months in Singapore.

Like many things, it happened gradually and then suddenly. The gradually: from watching my friends’ lives unfold on Facebook and Instagram, especially when they do all the things I can’t do here, like go on road trips and surf at the beach and get drunk for under $30. Being tagged in photos without my face, or tagged in comments with “I miss you!” and kiss-face emojis. Knowing that in my gridlocked hometown, everyone is having fun without me.

The suddenly: having an emotional breakdown one evening and realizing that the only people who have seen me ugly-cry live 3,000 kilometers away.

As I scrolled through my social feeds this morning, I briefly wondered if this is how dead people feel when they watch their loved ones from the afterlife (assuming that there is an afterlife where souls are capable of conscious thought).

It’s funny that I should feel this way, when all I ever wanted was to get as far away from my hometown as possible. I love my family and I love my friends, but the way I saw it, Manila had nothing for me anymore. I was wasting my life away in traffic, I didn’t want a career doing social media for agencies, I was tired of being a woman in a misogynistic society, and I couldn’t be the person I wanted to be if I kept enjoying the comforting presence of the places and people I’ve known for years.

When I moved to Singapore, I knew I made the right choice. I missed nothing about Manila, and I revelled in my new home. Making new friends was surprisingly easy! There are libraries! There are parks! There is single origin coffee! As a foreigner, I only pay 1% of my annual income in taxes!

Eventually, the novelty of living in a new city wore off. A breakup happened. To cope, I dove headfirst into new professional pursuits and discovered important things about who I am and what I want from my life. Objectively speaking, I’m doing great, and I feel so much gratitude for what I have now.

So why the fuck do I still miss Manila?

As it turns out, feeling homesick isn’t necessarily about missing home. It is, according to clinical psychologist Josh Klapow, “an instinctive need for love, protection and security — feelings and qualities usually associated with home.”

Basically, if you feel insecure in your new environment, you start missing your old life. You begin longing for your old routines, your old sense of normalcy, and the people who where part of it. Given how quickly things are changing for me, it’s not surprising that I find myself romanticising life back home. It’s so much easier to sink into the warm comfort of the familiar than to experience the unease of carving my own space in my still-new environment.

As for who is at risk for homesickness, a study on children and adolescents shows that those with “anxious-ambivalent attachment styles” are likely to feel uneasy about leaving home. Because they don’t know how their primary caregivers will respond to their anxiety, and feel uncertain about how worthy they are of love and attention, they are at risk for experiencing great distress in their new environment.

Yep, that sounds just like me!

Photo by Hans Vivek on Unsplash

Social media just makes this worse, and it does so in these ways: besides magnifying feelings of social isolation, which often happens when I scroll through my feed, Facebook and Instagram are also purveyors of nostalgia. It’s one thing to deliberately revisit your past; it’s another thing to have Facebook shove it in your face repeatedly with the On This Day feature. Based on the number of On this Day posts I get tagged in, it’s safe to say that many friends enjoy looking back at what they were doing a year or two ago. When things have more or less stayed the same, and nothing is amiss, nostalgia gives you a sense of continuity and assures you that you are living a meaningful life.

But when you’re feeling homesick and horribly insecure about your place in the world, nostalgia makes everything worse. Nothing makes me question my decision to leave home like seeing photos from surf trips and how tanned I used to be. I have since disabled the On This Day feature. When you’re trying to define your present, the last thing you want to do is view your past through VSCO-filtered glasses.

The good news is that I’m already doing some healthy coping strategies for overcoming homesickness. Besides reconnecting with old friends from Manila (use of social networks), I also have more Singaporean friends than I did last year, which really helps in making me feel more local (self-directed cultural learning).

This study also suggests staying in contact with friends and family from back home. In the smartphone age, however, I’m not really sure how helpful this is. It is too easy to text a friend and avoid the hard work that comes with being present and forming social ties here.

The smart way to cope with homesickness is to recognise that it is a feeling triggered by mental images that don’t represent the full reality of what I’m missing. The social posts that make me wistful for my old life are largely curated versions of what I will actually encounter. There’s no doubt that seeing my friends and family will make me indescribably happy. But I will also experience so much else that is dull and dispiriting: hours spent in soul-crushing traffic, getting catcalled on the street, an entire afternoon in the lineup without catching a single wave, the inevitable run-in with an ex.

When my friends’ Facebook posts tell me that there’s a lot I’m missing out on, it’s probably helpful to remember that staying on my phone means missing out on building new friendships, discovering new favorite places, and enjoying the pleasure of my own company.

It took me 3 years to build the life in Manila that I miss. If I stay open and give it more time, I know that I will grow into Singapore and eventually call it home.

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