In Defense of Homesickness

My wife and our 11 week old daughter, Scout, are at the beach this week. Turns out, when you have your first child, a lot of people want to meet and hold that baby! And this trip is for Scout to rightfully meet a lot of Scout’s aunts, uncles, and extended family.

I’m at camp, which is exactly where I should be. And for the first time in several years I’m in a position to practice what I preach in one key area: Homesickness.

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I’ve long believed that Homesickness is the most profound human emotion. 

Through my personal experiences, and helping others along the way, I’ve found homesickness to be an amalgamation of love, joy, longing, beauty, and pain—each beneficial and meaningful to the human experience in their own right. It just so happens that within the missing home they are all simultaneously alive, swirling around and pinging off the walls of the head and the heart.

What is also profound to me is its inescapability—every developing human will experience homesickness, and thank goodness for that! I hope that by the end of this article you’ll not only recognize the many gifts in homesickness, but be brought to consider your own experience with it.

Embracing challenge is central to the mission of Rockmont

For many this means accomplishing a physical challenge or reaching for a rank at council. For me, my challenge was simply to complete the camp session for many years. To get through the day-to-day and work on being present to the experience.

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There are several schools of thought in the residential summer camp community about homesickness: one ethos teaches to avoid talking about it and simply distract or keep the camper busy. Another is to send a flare up to the family and say camp may not be a fit.

At Rockmont, we lean-in to homesickness.

Our Tell Me More approach of facing camper (and staff) homesickness may seem counterintuitive in its practice. But I, and hundreds of other campers and staff, have reaped lasting benefits from caring staff leaning-in to the conversation. Here are some elements of this ethos:

 

“Thanks for sharing.”

Anytime a camper shares something (from the seemingly small like a part of their day, or as large as a challenging part of their home life), we train our staff to express gratitude. Sharing things costs something: the emotional energy to go there, or the energy it takes to work up the courage to share a part of their lives. It is fitting that sharing should be met with gratitude, and an acknowledgement that their sacrifice is seen and valued.

“I’m glad you’re homesick.”

While not jumping into every aspect of my theory around homesickness and its many gifts, often, after a camper has shared with me their feelings around missing home I say, “Thank You”, and “I’m Glad.” I’m glad that what they have at home is so incredible it is worth missing. This paradigm is helpful as we move through the process of meeting the challenge!

On the move.

Often, a camper or staff member’s emotion can cause them to pause. When I’m having these conversations the first invitation is to move—walk towards the next activity, or simply take a walk! This act of moving the body helps not only release some dopamine naturally when our bodies are active, but also serve as an emblem of the movement that is happening internally. 

Usually, when we arrive at the skill or activity, the camper wants to jump in!

Honesty.

“Will this ever go away completely?” “Can I/you call my parents?” “Can I go home?”

This is a challenge for the staff involved in the conversation, and one we similarly lean-in to. Being honest and clear (and, of course, kind) from the beginning of these conversations is essential to the movement through it. 

For the parent to know—no news is good news from us. Even if your son is homesick, we’re seeing progress and are actively engaged in his environment.

“Will this ever go away completely?”

“I don’t know, but I do know you can miss home and still have an incredible experience at camp!”

“Is there something you could build, learn, experience & take it home with you?”

These questions and other conversational nudges introduce the idea that, if they’re life is anything like mine, they’ll experience similar emotions throughout their lives – at any given moment, life is more than just one thing. You can be hopeful and expectant while simultaneously down. You can feel anxious about a big event coming up & still revel in courageous words spoken by a friend or mentor.

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The benefit.

After I moved off to study at Belmont University in Nashville (about a 4 hour drive from my hometown), something clicked. Many students in my class and on my dorm floor were really struggling—calling home multiple times a day and going home every weekend.

A new buddy of mine and I were talking about this phenomena one day in the fall of our freshman year. He asked me a question, and it’s about the only time a movie-scripted light bulb clicked on above my head.

“I don’t know why [our friends are having trouble]. Did you ever go to summer camp?”

Bam. It clicked.

We both had gone to a residential summer camp. Even though I did miss my home, rhythms, routine, and family, I also had the gift of years of moving through the challenge of homesickness. I had developed tools and skills through conversation with my camp counselors that were activated in my university experience without me even noticing.

Did I enjoy being homesick at camp? Not especially. But, as you can possibly guess,

I wouldn’t change it for the world.

One of the aspects of homesickness campers regularly point out is the name. “I don’t miss my home… It’s just a building.” Myself, or our staff affirm this by speaking about home as a concept—the people in our lives we love and care about.

So, in conversation with a staff member who was experiencing some homesickness and wanted to talk about it yesterday, I was able to look at him and not say, “Man, I’ve been there…”, but instead, “Man, I am there!”

“Wait, don’t you live here?”

“Yep, and my family is at the beach.”

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If you’re reading this, it’s likely that at some point you launched from your home and into the world. I imagine it didn’t come without its own challenges. 

Thank goodness for summer camp, and more specifically Rockmont, for being a place where young men can come to experience the fullness of camp, but also the challenges—within an incredible community, dedicated to supporting them fully.

 

Daniel Weatherby

Associate Director