what is this i'm feeling?

Something particularly peculiar happened to me on this trip to India. Well, actually, a lot of peculiar things happened but this particular peculiarity had nothing to do with India and everything to do with me.

I got homesick.

Honestly, this never happens—not homesickness per se. I always miss Tom. I sometimes get exhausted and overwhelmed. I often long for my own bed. I sometimes have trouble with one or more of my travel companions. (Many years ago, on a grueling trip in Australia, I was the press trip geek—the one person among a group who just doesn’t quite click with the rest. I'd never been the press trip geek before and it was awful. I called Tom from Ayers Rock, sobbing with exhaustion and insecurity. Insult to injury: The sniveling phone call cost me $70.)

But this bout of homesickness was different for me. It wasn’t in reaction to much of anything and it was all-out I wanna go home and see Tom and Jack and write and eat dinner and go to sleep in my own bed and not have to worry about all this strangeness RIGHT NOW!

This wave of misery hit me a few days into the trip, during the long wedding ceremony. The wedding took place over four days at a resort outside Hyderabad. While everyone was very nice, I didn’t know anyone well, including Catherine, who understandably was wrapped up in seeing old friends, leaving me mostly to myself. I was older than everyone in my group and I didn’t have any logical place among the ecstatic throngs of family or friends. I felt like a loose thread.

As a rule, I get lonelier in crowds than I ever do alone. And here I was in a crowd of strangers, far from home, feeling left out (this was partly self-inflicted, I’m at an awkward age). And I was jet lagged. And I didn’t have internet access to touch base with Tom, which always cheers me up on the road. (IM is a great invention for travelers.)

Thinking back, I can hardly believe what I did. I left the wedding ceremony early (it went on for hours, so I felt I’d seen a lot), went to the room, got in bed, and cried. I thought about Tom. I pictured Jack’s silly face. I imagined myself on the couch, drinking tea and watching Oprah while I write, as I do most weekday afternoons. I wanted to go home.

Oy vey, right? Here I was in the midst of a travelers’ wet dream—an Indian wedding—and I wanted to be at home, on my couch.

So, I’m of two minds about this.

The dark side implicates my increasing agoraphobia. When I’m not traveling, I spend a lot of time at home alone. I feel bad about that only because it’s the sort of thing society frowns on. Otherwise, I don’t care that much. Still, I am so reluctant to go out and interact with the world (ask Tom how hard it is to get me to go to the grocery store) that I have to worry about myself a little bit.

Will agoraphobia interfere with my desire to travel?

But there’s my other mind, too. And that mind was happy about this bout of run-of-the-mill homesickness.

After all, I started traveling 30 years ago because of certain feeling of rootlessness. “The outsider” has been my identity for most of my life, and I wrenched my roots from New York City with great intention when I started traveling, determined to become a citizen of the world. Some people do their seeking in church, I did it in a Greyhound bus.

While leaving home has always been stressful, I’ve never minded being away from it. In my first few years of travel writing, it never occurred to me to check in with Tom while I was on the road—he would put me on an airplane and hear nothing from me until he picked me up at the airport however long later, sometimes weeks. I know—weird right? Honestly, I wasn’t being mean. It just truly did not occur to me.

In fact, through most of my life, I’ve been bluer about returning home than being away, and have wrestled with a sort of homesickness for where I’d been.

But this longing for the profoundly banal details of home, this sense of belonging somewhere (even if it is the couch) and with someone, this sense of being far away from my place in the big world…it was bittersweet. Boo hoo hoooooooooooo.

I felt better in the morning. And I sat on the couch and drank tea and watched Oprah while I wrote this.