Homesick, USA

“I am homesick for a place I have never actually been,” says the face on the screen in front of me, “like I have lost something I never actually had.”

The line strikes me as poetical and I wonder for a second if I have not heard it somewhere before, my reverie taking me to half-forgotten verse and dusty college library reading rooms a world away. It is at first an unconscious association but also part defense, for despite the genuine poetical nuance and the intellectual curiosity piqued, it is the emotion here, the feeling, that carries the most weight. Even over the digital divide it is very real to both of us. We honor it. We sit in it.

The face, my patient, is 3,600 miles away from me and yet I know exactly where he is—the off-white walls and dim light through scuffed windows offering glimpses down onto the ever-busy Cowgate are intimately familiar to me. I have sat in that space, maybe even the same room—the same chair?—the same dorm in the university student accommodation. We are the two of us displaced: he in the city of Edinburgh, Scotland, the place from which I emigrated to the USA over a decade ago; I in my office in the American Midwest, the part of the world my patient grew up in and for which he now painfully yearns.

Except that’s not exactly true. It’s not quite this place, this Midwest, for which my patient is “homesick” but rather an imagined world of support and comfort he has, by his own admission, never actually known but which must surely be better than the lonely torment of his current isolation. The child of an alcoholic mother and an absent father, he has known mostly indifference if not outright hostility from them throughout his life. This fantasized home of love and community exists only as preconscious echo in his mind, and yet he clings to it, fights for it through the pain of adjusting to more than just the dark Scottish winters. It is a lifeline, as is perhaps this call: a return to treatment after several months away. “I don’t know what I expected,” he tells me, “but it wasn’t this.” 

In considering the journey of the immigrant, Hazel Ipp writes of the “amputated self,” the part that is “left behind, severed and frozen in place” and does not, cannot accompany the rest on the emigration journey (Ipp, 2010, p. 376). This experience of psychological dismemberment and resultant isolation from lost components of the self compounds the pain many immigrants experience when trying to build a new life and find a new sense of safety and security in their adopted home. Much like Ipp, my experience with my displaced patient provoked in me a “growing awareness of aspects of myself I had left behind” (Ipp, 2010, p. 380) as well as the associated grief at their loss, a deprivation one is not always able or willing to grieve. It is a pain I believe many of us sit with but often struggle to name.

Grief has been on our minds lately, both my patient’s and mine. In addition to the anguish inherent in his transatlantic move and resultant “regressus ad uterum,” our work has also touched upon the grief we share with many of our fellow Americans at the loss of another home, another nurturing womb: that of the very country he grew up in and to which I moved. Just a few days before our meeting, I had gathered with many other concerned citizens and residents at one of the many No Kings marches taking place across the nation. Waving a plethora of flags and banners, we voiced our anger at a government that appears not only uncaring and cruel but downright un-American, willing to trample the rights of the people in favor of a would-be king. Addressing the crowd, one fellow marcher commented that, in the current political and social climate, the US no longer felt like home, a sentiment endorsed by many present who found themselves suddenly and quite unexpectedly grieving parts lost to a national transition that involved no physical relocation, no emigration or expat drive at all. 

Just as my patient’s move to Scotland was an elective one, so was my relocation to the USA. As much as we lost parts of ourselves, our identities in those moves, we were also forced to confront others: On the cobbled streets of Auld Reekie, my patient was rendered “the American” with all the baggage (positive and otherwise) that comes with such a label whether he sought it out or not. As unintentional migrants, ones whose country has shifted around them rather than the other way around, many of us here in the US are now feeling as displaced and lost as the traveler in a land that no longer looks, sounds, or behaves like home. We are, in a sense, all homesick for a place we have never actually been: for an America and its accompanying dreams we are told of and about, shown and promised but that, for most of us, no longer exists, if it ever did at all. I know I am homesick for it even though this land is only my adopted, my elective home. A republic “if [we] can keep it,” as Benjamin Franklin is reported to have said (McHenry, 1799), perhaps with a prophetic eye to this very moment.

“I don’t know what I expected but it wasn’t this.” When my patient says this, I wonder out loud whether he is speaking just about his move to Scotland, the lifeline of our session or perhaps life in general; life that has not always given him the support and love he has needed. There is no easy answer. My patient is longing for a supportive community and family he never actually knew but one that he feels a deep desire for, one he feels he deserves. Reflecting on this, we note that, despite the relatively short time he has been in Scotland, he has already made a number of local friends, has found outlets for his existing passions and hobbies, and is actively seeking out and discovering new ones. My patient ponders that maybe it is by embracing the changes his move has brought, including the inherent discomfort, that he can ultimately grow through it. Mourning the loss of his amputated self is an important aspect of this process but it is certainly not the whole thing. 

Perhaps the same is true here: there are no easy answers. The American experiment is an ongoing project, an attempt to build a home, a society unlike any other; one that it is perhaps yet to fully realize, one that none of us has ever really known to exist outside of dreams and aspirations. Just as migration, whether temporary or permanent relocation, voluntary or forced, leads to amputation of the self, it also has the power to reveal great inner strengths—we only need look at the history of the melting pot of America to see that. The truth is that this country will continue to grow in ways that are almost certain to be difficult and frightening—that has been true for the last two hundred and fifty years as well. It is only by embracing the pain, the homesick yearnings for an imagined world of safety and opportunity, an American dream, that we can start to heal the wound and maybe even build that home, that society that we, the people, definitely deserve.

The call ends on an uncertain note: my patient unsure of his future in Scotland, in America or anywhere, unsure whether he will reach out to me again. As I sit in silence, lost in my own mourning of a sort, I remember a line of a poem by the late Alistair Elliot: 

“(…) you’ll be beautiful always. Always 

I long for you (…) 

O escaped 

Land of my childhood, O America!” 

– America: a Love Poem