Home Sick
Today is the 29th of August 2018 and I'm Home Sick.
Here is the catch! I've been home, for nearly three months, since the first of June!
I leave to go back to college on the 7th of September with my beautiful mom and my car (yet to be named) from Ohio to Savannah GA. That's like a ten hour drive, if we speed and only take one rest stop.
I've been in my hometown nearly all summer. Sleeping and eating and inhabiting the house I grew up in, the very vessel that contains all of my childhood memories. So why is it that nearly a week before I leave this lush and fertile Ohio valley, I am suddenly homesick to the point of nausea?
Could it be that my heart is elsewhere?
Being that "home is where the heart is" and if my heart is not in Ohio neither is my home?
Or maybe it is because I received an email invitation to my friend Kaj's 21'st birthday party during my lunch break and I became rushed with excitement for this coming year's events and plans and unimaginable projects? Might it have been the Instagram story my friend Olivia just posted about her upcoming move to Hong Kong after her summer in NY? That allowed my mind and soul to flood with the memories, sights, sounds and smells of my life I left behind when I left Hong Kong last winter?
Yeah...that could be it.
It also might simply be that I posted and immediately deleted my post on Instagram tonight three times, doubting each choice more than the last and loathing the algorithm and insecurity Instagram has given me in my own art that I work so incredibly hard on.
Knowing myself it is likely all of these factors, culminated and circulated through my system like a virus, attacking me at my weakest, looking for any point of entry. And to credit myself it took me nearly all of my summer vacation before I suffered the foul sting of Home Sick.
I survived near isolation from all of my college and hometown friends,
a canceled art directing job in Colorado,
my beloved truck's breaks going out resulting in its cold junkyard grave that rendered me carless and even more isolated at times,
the rejection of a job I was under the impression I was guaranteed I would have,
breaking my hand,
a bridezilla,
and missing out on trips/job offers in Chicago, Michigan, and New York.
All of this before I became unforgivingly homesick, and to this I consider someone like myself rather strong.
And here, as I am typing this, I come to an understanding and will own-up to it like a good man. I am homesick. and I am tired. I miss my friends and my house in Savannah and my rowdy, boisterous, misfit housemates and the lifestyle I have when I am living on my own. I miss Hong Kong and I'm exhausted with America and I really really really just want to run away....but I cant! I can't just...
Well I honestly can't think of a reason why not to run away.
That being said my judgment is clouded, and my ambitions are high. So I think where I'm trying to go with this, is that I am in and or maybe at a point of my life where i have become too consistent and humdrum or predictable.
And I need to mix life up again.
I crave the unpredictable and the chaos. The sense of purpose and camaraderie that I have when working on projects and films with my classmates. Being an artist is the greatest reward, and this summer I feel as though I have not been the artist that I know myself to be. And reflecting on these past months, I think that I've felt a bit valueless.
But that is all about to change, I promise!
