Homesickness

I'll admit, I've been struggling with depression for over a year. Some of it has been financial: I haven't had steady work in a long time, and we've been lurching from crisis to crisis, hoping each month we'd be able to pay the bills and keep our home. That damaged my self-esteem more than I realized, starting to wonder if I was unemployable before I even reached fifty. Some of it has been due to the ongoing legal battle over my stepdaughter's custody and medical treatment, which has taken a horrific toll on the whole family. Thankfully those issues are beginning to resolve, and I start a new job in about a week, teaching at Full Sail University.

However, it's taken me a while to realize that there's been an unseen third factor - homesickness. It seems that it's something almost all expatriates suffer from after a couple of years abroad. It can often last a year or two, after which they either recover or go home. Fortunately, I seem to be recovering.

If you're not British, you have no idea what this is all about.

One of the things you don't realize the significance of when you move away from home is holidays and other traditions. Take Christmas, for example. First time you experience Christmas in your adopted country, it's new and exciting and different. The next year, it's sort of familiar, but it's not yet part of your personal tradition. The third year, you start missing the mince pies, the sparklers, the turkey dinner, the crackers, even the tin of Quality Street and the dumb Christmas special re-runs on TV. They've been part of your life for always, and now you're conscious that they're gone.

And you miss those birthday drinks with the people you've got together with since always. The annual Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race where you pretend for a day that you care about sports. The New Year's Eve family dinner you always hated except for talking to one of the cousins, but now you see the pictures on Facebook of everyone else playing those stupid after dinner games. The coy, polite ads for Safeways instead of the brash, screeching commercials for Wal-Mart or Target. The unfulfillable cravings for your favorite comfort food when you're sick. Primroses and snowdrops on the roadside in the spring. It's the little things that slowly get you.

But perhaps most of all, for a Celt like me, living in Florida, what I miss is a sense of history. Before moving here, I owned a house that was four centuries old, in a town two millennia old, and from my window I could see burial mounds four thousand years old. I went to school and lived in buildings constructed in 1382. I studied archaeology and thought of the mediaeval period as modern. My world was steeped in mythology and folklore, in history and tradition. Solstices and Equinoxes at Stonehenge or Glastonbury were normal, and I drove past those places every week. And that was nothing unusual - the whole country was like that. Hell, the whole damn continent is full of ancient stuff.

This place is part of my soul. It's not just an image on a New Age T-shirt.

But here, anything older than me is considered "historic". American versions of European traditions seem like commercialized parodies of what I'm used to. They're fun, and they're important local traditions in their own right, but they're not the same.

I've felt, in the very truest sense of the word, rootless. America has been my home for four years, and I love it here and have no desire to return to England, but I haven't felt like I'm part of the place in the way I do in England. For a long time I couldn't work out why I felt as I did, until a chance remark from a friend, an English girl living in North Carolina, made me realize that my depression was about more than just money and stress. Talking to friends and family back home, and staying in touch, isn't the same as being immersed in the place. I guess that's why so many expats end up forming isolated communities where they can maintain the traditions of home and pretend they're still back where they came from.

Recognizing homesickness as part of the problem was a big step in addressing it. It's about understanding who I am, and where I fit in this culture, and how I can maintain my sense of identity when I'm so far from everything that's familiar to me. I don't feel British, but I'm not an American either. Instead, I'm having to learn to be just a person who has been lucky enough to have experienced most of my life in a culture that most of the other people around me have only read about or seen in books; and I have to learn to let go of my past in the same way I let go of my possessions.

As Richard Bach said in Illusions, I am here now, and that's all of us can ever be.

Things I don't miss at all

So far this week, I've talked about things I miss most, and things I expected to miss but don't. Today, I'll tell you a few things I'm really glad to have got away from. (Watch out, Rude Word Zone ahead.)

• CCTV cameras. Over here I can walk down the street or drive my car anywhere I please without feeling like I've got the fucking Stasi watching me all the time. They have rednecks with guns here, and they have crazy-ass cops with heavy weaponry, and they're all paranoid about fanatical communist muslim terrorists who want to destroy their way of life and suspicious of foreigners, but they haven't let that erode their basic freedoms and way of life like we have. That alone makes me want to stay here, and not come back to the surveillance state Britain has become. It's hard to express how different it makes me feel, and almost impossible to do so without comparing Britain to Germany in the 1930s, invoking Godwin's Law, and having to censor myself. I'll settle for quoting Santayana. Those who do not learn from history...
• British politics. Gordon Brown. David Cameron. Some other bloke in the Lib Dems. Nick Griffin. Where's the leadership? Where's the inspiration? Where's the reason to vote for any of those self-centred useless fuckers? All they do is talk shit and give money to their City friends. At least the American banks are now paying their bailout back, not giving themselves big bonuses and demanding more money from taxpayers. And Obama is kicking people's butts every day to change America. He's the sort of politician we need in Britain - someone who can get people off their arses to make a difference. It scares me that the BNP may well get an alarmingly good result next election, just because they're the only party who actually appear to stand for something and want to make a real change. (Godwin again. Sorry.)
• The X Factor. Seriously, you guys still care? The RATM protest was interesting, but only because so many otherwise reasonable people thought it was important enough to stop Simon Cowell getting a Christmas Number One. So what? It matters about as much as who won Big Bleeding Brother or I'm A Celebrity Look At Me Making A Prat Of Myself.
• Cold, wet weather. It's snowing in England, and meanwhile I'm wearing shirt sleeves, and at Christmas I'm going to lie on the beach with rum & Coke. Snow's pretty and all, but words cannot express how happy it makes me feel not to wake up feeling cold and damp, not getting soggy feet trudging through slush, not having to swaddle myself in layers of sweaters, overcoats, scarf, hat and gloves just to go to the corner shop, and not arriving at the office feeling miserable with a cold red nose and a stinky cold. English winters - you can keep 'em.
• Car parking. Driving on English roads in general is pretty horrible. Taking a bike out for a blast round country roads is fun, but most of the time driving in England involves boring crowded motorways or being stuck in traffic jams in towns and streets originally designed for horses. And then when you eventually get where you're going, you have to spend ages trying to find a parking spot and end up having to leave the car miles away. Here, everywhere has plenty of parking space, and you just get out right where you want to be. And it's almost always free. We can park at least six cars on the driveways outside our house, and that's before we start parking on the grass. After Cambridge, where you're lucky if you can park just one car in your own bloody street half the time, and where parking your car at the office is something to fight over, that's a real luxury.

Tomorrow: things I like most about this place