People Spent All Year at Home — Now, We’re Homesick for Other Places

Lindsay Wallace has collected memories of temporary rooms, of an “ever-increasing number of places where I’ve just been like, this is where I’m going to sleep for eight months and then after that I will never see this room again.” She’s lived in a different room every four years in boarding school and again in college, experienced different living situations over almost every summer between semesters, and has lived in two apartments during the pandemic alone. But a constant in her life was a friend’s home where her friend’s mom, Jo-Ann, served as an extension of family. When Wallace signed her first lease, she went to Jo-Ann for advice, and Jo-Ann assured Wallace she’d help plan her wedding someday. “It’s a lot of, for lack of a better term, mom stuff. And that’s part of what’s made that house feel like home to me, too,” Wallace said.  

But now Jo-Ann is selling her house, and as a result, Wallace is experiencing grief for a home that was never technically hers — while she sits locked down in her own apartment hundreds of miles away. Somewhere between longing and nostalgia, it seemed like a novel version of homesickness — something many people around the world are experiencing in their own unique ways as the coronavirus pandemic bypasses the one-year mark. 

Enter the idea of being homesick while at home: While homesickness itself is not a novel concept, more and more people began to feel that acutely familiar sense of longing for places outside their front doors during the pandemic. As weeks of lockdown stretched into months, that homesickness began to serve as a reminder of the many places “home” can be, and the many things people have been asked to do without during a once-in-a-lifetime health crisis.

The shelter-in-place orders that first crisscrossed the United States in March 2020 forced many people to adapt to living the entirety of their lives within the confines of their own four walls for the first time. This reality underscored how that had been the case for disabled and/or immunocompromised people, caretakers, and other people for decades; it also highlighted the ways in which the system was better suited to crumble, and left some people entirely displaced.

So it’s understandable that people instantly felt a sense of loss for the places and people that feel like home, but perhaps aren’t in our literal homes. 

In Wallace’s case, that longing for a sense of home comes not just in the form of her friend’s house, but in the family she found there, especially after her own mother passed away several years ago. “There are so many memories associated with specific rooms, and the kinds of mundane domestic rituals that you don’t realize are rituals until you can’t do them anymore,” Wallace adds. “Like, having very serious half-drunken emotional conversations sitting on the kitchen counters, or this one group photo that we take in the same place every year.” Sure, she’s been at her own home for the better part of a year, but she has also suddenly become homesick for a place — and a comfort — just out of reach.

“There can be a real distinction between the idea of a house versus the idea of a home, although not always,” Dr. Kristina M. Scharp, Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Washington, tells Apartment Therapy. Scharp, who has done research on homesickness, explained that people often discuss home as a place of comfort, where they had a chance to feel safe, loved, and be themselves. “It was more than just a physical structure. Rather, it was a collective of place, people, activities, and emotion,” she adds. 

But what do you do when your home can no longer be that place? Where do you even go to absolve your homesickness, when the comfort you’re seeking is more abstract than it is physical? Do we need a whole new word for the kind of homesickness you feel within your same four walls?

Homesickness, as the concept was developed in the 17th century, was seen as a medical issue: It arose out of medical literature as a way of describing the sensation or maladies people were experiencing away from home. Over time, homesickness became a more sentimental emotion, though Brown believes a sentimental view of homesickness sometimes obscures how much the emotion can still be tied to lacking a stable place to call home. 

“It’s hard for me to distinguish my housing situation and feelings of homesickness from the broader structural precarity in America that the pandemic has exposed,” says Natalie Brown, a writer and scholar who wrote a dissertation on homesickness and economic precarity in nineteenth-century literature. “A house is such a nexus of how one is paying for it, what benefits like schools or jobs its community provides and also the opportunity costs of being in that location, such as living far from family,” Brown notes, adding that the lack of affordable housing and accessible childcare, as well as gentrification and racist housing policies, can significantly impact how people think of “home” and if they can even return there at all.

Brown also has young children, and relies on the “home” provided by places like her car, where she can be alone, or her own mom’s house, where she can relax. “When one is a caregiver, tasked with making home for everyone else, it’s difficult to find where’s home for you? You’re always engaged in the work of building home for other people,” she adds.

The current nature of life at home — or, at least, in one physical location — is complicated: Just as a living space can hold comfort and joy for some people, it might house abuse, stress, or discomfort for others. As countless people transform their living spaces into workplaces, classrooms, and gyms, it’s worth noting that many people who are disabled or have chronic illnesses were staying home before the pandemic. 

Others do not have the luxury of spending much time at home at all; they’re on call or picking up shifts for work. And, “it is absolutely possible that people can experience homesickness for different versions of home,” says Scharp, who notes that when she and her colleagues asked people what they missed when they were homesick in 2015, every person described activities they used to do. “This is particularly relevant during the pandemic when we often cannot engage in the routines that were a major source of predictability in our everyday lives,” Scharp adds, noting that it’s unsurprising that a lot of people are feeling homesick.

It’s also understandable why people might associate “home” with individuals they couldn’t see due to the pandemic. “I’m not really a people person, but the friends that I do have really become a major part of my routine and my comfort, so having to leave those people was a lot to take in emotionally,” says RaJon Staunton, who abruptly moved off their college campus to their familial home nearly a year ago. It’s hard to maintain long-distance friendships, in general, and Staunton has found it challenging to replicate the support system they had at school. 

“This homesickness almost feels like a rope being pulled, like a tug-o-war,” they explain. When they’re in their hometown, they’re “home” but not really home — their heart is in their college town, including with people they love deeply.

It’s also possible to feel homesick for a place that is just down the street, or to feel homesick for the city you’re in as you used to know it, even though you never left. There is a Phở restaurant that Hailey Hoyt, a 24-year-old who is living with her parents, misses deeply: She would always sit at the bar and order beef Phở and Sprite for $15 plus tip — but it’s not safe to do so now. It’s those small moments people are missing, she says. “Home goes beyond a physical place to sleep; it’s also about community, people, lifestyle, routine,” she tells Apartment Therapy. “And all of those things are often made up of small things that add richness to a person’s life.”

Setha Low, PhD, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, Geography, and Environmental psychology at City University of New York’s Graduate Center, says home is defined as a place you feel safe, where you’re surrounded by people who love you, where you can be yourself, and usually, where you have some sort of established routine. After the Industrial Revolution, Low says, when people started going out to work, there was the home, the private; and work, the public. But there was also what Low calls “these in-between or third places, which are not home. And they’re not work. And they’re not completely public, nor are they completely private, but they’re a sort of place in-between.” They’re your corner bar, your coffee shop where you “do your writing,” your local Phở place.

Limiting time in these spaces was critical to public health. Every place you miss is a place someone else is pouring labor in. Stores and restaurants don’t sanitize themselves; toilet paper doesn’t just appear in the public restroom you use on your running route. Employees have to deal with individuals who don’t want to wear masks and enforcing guidelines, sanitation procedures, and ensuring customers are following social distancing protocols — and since there is no paid shutdown, not everyone is able to stay home. Part of grappling with missing third places that compromise routines or community means unpacking the fact that these spaces aren’t the same for everyone, and are situated within the context of factors including economics and accessibility. 

“The nature of my industry has always been community,” says Kassie Rehorn, who has been working in a restaurant and coffee shop in Arizona throughout the pandemic. As the restaurant remains hyper-vigilant on mask and sanitation procedures, Rehorn is watching people return to a third place they’ve missed. “Through this pandemic, we’ve had so many guests tell us how special and important our place is to them,” she adds. 

Low added that when you go somewhere time and time again, you get to know people and have something in common with them. When those relations endure, it turns into community. “The ability to create a kind of public culture of tolerance does matter. And you aren’t doing that on Zoom.”

The configurations of home itself have also changed, or been rapidly sped up in the wake of the pandemic. Some people described the profound sense of loneliness that came from living entirely on their own in a time where the space where we live has become where we do everything.

“Homesickness is a difficult feeling to resolve when the consolations of leaving home, such as greater career opportunities, family formation or home ownership, become less attainable,” says Brown, explaining she doesn’t believe we can cope with profound homesickness by changing our attitudes or just staying in touch with technology, but instead, it will require addressing economic and political instability of this moment. 

For her part, Wallace and her partner have begun decorating their apartment, moving furniture, hanging shelves and paintings, and ordering a new carpet. “Although at the same time, we’ve started talking again about how maybe we actually should move for one reason or another, and I sort of dread that idea even as it kind of scratches an itch for me,” she adds. She’s mourning the house by preserving memories: She’s collecting photos from friends of them all at the house over the years.

Because home ties into who we are, and how we see ourselves in the world, it’s worth looking at the broader scope of what home can feel like — multiple communities, the places that map our worlds beyond our living rooms, investment in people and spaces that bring us back to versions of ourselves we miss. As the world changes rapidly, outside the four walls many of us know as home, home isn’t all we’re missing — the web of what home means to us is.