In a week, I will have been at Amherst College for exactly one month — one month sounding relatively insubstantial yet at the same time, it conjures a sense of concreteness, like a conspicuous marker signalling the rest of our college careers.
The day before I left for Massachusetts, my mom stood over me as I haphazardly crammed the last of my possessions in a newly bought suitcase. I was, as always, doing things last minute. My mother, unsure of how to help, critiqued my folding skills and reminded me that in college, I would not have her around to clean up after me. Her chastisement was tinged with worry: as her “trouble” child, she was hesitant to let me go, for fear that I would fall into some black hole of irreversible immorality. It was all very amusing to me.
I was the last in my friend group to leave for college. My best friend had already been up at Vassar for a couple weeks by the time I finally left Chicago. Everyone I knew was offering me advice, telling wild college stories I wasn’t sure I believed, and introducing me to their roommates via grainy Skype calls; I received late graduation checks in the mail from relatives, all signed with a hopeful “good luck at Amherst!” and the next thing I knew, I had shipped my belongings and was strapped onto an airplane seat heading to what appeared to be the next four years of my life.
I want to say that I arrived on campus and it immediately felt like home and that I found a group of friends within the couple of days and all that jazz. That’s how it was supposed to go, right? I couldn’t understand why I felt so incredibly isolated the first week. My high school friends seemed to be having the time of their lives, at least that’s what I gained from snapchat stories and the occasional phone call — I, on the other hand, was miserable and incessantly homesick. I missed my family and my best friends, and even though I went through orientation with a friendly face on, I felt something within me shrivel up and recede on itself.
My mom called me at least every day for that first week: I was an emotional wreck! I complained about everything, from forgetting my favorite shoes at home to the lack of authentic Asian food near campus, until my mom asked me sternly in Chinese, “How do you expect to find anything good if you’re constantly whining about the bad?” I rolled my eyes at her chastening, and being the drama queen that I was, vowed that I would never like it here, this place in the middle of nowhere.
I am happy to say that I was completely wrong. The more people I met, the more it came to my knowledge that everyone around me was feeling the same way, to some extent. There were people I immediately clicked with, others not so much, but I realized that the reason I was so homesick was that I never even gave Amherst a chance to begin with. There are times I still miss my parents, or my younger brother, or my friends but it is not as bad as before. Oftentimes, homesickness derives from a wish for comfort, usually one vested in an environment you are familiar with. For those of you who have or are still struggling with homesickness, my best advice would be to put yourself out there, join some clubs and meet new people. As my all-knowing mom likes to say, how do you expect to move forward if you’re always looking behind you?
