Halfway Home

I've been trying to remember how long it took before uni felt like home to me when I first moved there.

This is a pointless exercise on two fronts. One, because moving away for uni was completely different to moving across the globe for shits'n'gigs, and two because thinking of uni is in itself a destructive behaviour at this point in time.

For the past week or so I have been brutally homesick. I would even go so far to say this bout of homesickness is worse than the original. Because there is no real reason why, three months in, I should suddenly start to long for the motherland. And while I've not been reduced to awkwardly holding back tears over the dinner table, I have had serious trouble finding the motivation to do anything other than lie in bed and watch internet re-runs of The Animals of Farthing Wood. Not to mention I had no warning for this one. It was just...BAM. Out of the blue.

Well, no. That's not strictly true. About a week ago I finally got around to telling my student liaison officer I wouldn't be attending my graduation ceremony. Those of you paying attention may notice this email was sent around the same time I decided hibernation was the best idea, like, ever.

I've obviously known I wouldn't be at grad since I decided to move to London last year. And I figured travelling trumped a testamur. But I hadn't told uni because some small part of me held out an illogical hope that maybe I'd get to do it anyway, which kind of implies I was kidding myself. So now I'm wondering: did I make the wrong choice?

On the one hand, Europe is pretty much guaranteed to be here for at least a little while longer. Grad is something I'm only going to get to do once. Even if I do another degree later on, it's not really the same. Is missing the ceremony something I'm going to seriously regret?

But then again I can't pretend that I haven't been loving being here. If I hadn't moved when I did I would never have met any of the people or done any of the things I have in the last few months.

I don't know. Right now all I want to do is basically get so drunk I forget I'm in England, which is always a bad option because it inevitably leads to my making terrible life choices (something I don't actually need any chemical help with), and also because it's depressing and shit. Nobody wants to be that person. But I still have the degree. And going to grad would have effected me for a day. I'm fairly confident moving to England will have further reaching effects.

It's not all bad, though. What I can gather from the similar experiences of other au pairs I've met here is that it takes roughly six months before London really feels like home. So I'm halfway there.