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Visiting my hometown and feeling a bit sad (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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So about 2 years ago, I moved away. Broken spirit broken person, over 3000 miles. However, yesterday I landed for my first visit back here. And I just feel weird. Like I'm not supposed to be here or something, it's very ominous. I constantly feel anxious.

The weirdest thing was seeing how my parents have started to age. And the woods where I used to hang out are all housing developments now. I'm currently sleeping on a mattress in my old room, aka the office now, surrounded by random shelving and printers and stuff. it's really a weird feeling in here too.

I don't know what I expected but I definitely don't feel like I'm "home". It's like some weird alternate dimension version of home. There's still some people I'm yet to see and I wonder how that's gonna go. So far everything already feels uncomfortably different. Alongside that, the rose tint has also come off and I have a lot of bad memories going through my head too instead of any sort of nostalgia. Almost like the different person I was back then is still lurking here somewhere watching me.

Anyone familiar with such a feeling, after being away for so long?

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 9 months ago (2 children)

While the article's author seems to mostly complain about changes, I personally experienced the opposite. After years the town had barely changed at all, which felt very strange and worse the people that stuck around, but aged, had become what I perceived as distorted shadows of what I remembered with very little personal growth apparent.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Well, thinking about “you can’t go home again”, it can be because the home you knew no longer exists

Or the you that was no longer exists

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago

There's an expression that no person ever steps into the same river twice: because it's not the same river, and they're not the same person.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago

In my 40s I went back to my home town, not having lived there since I was 18 (none of my family still lived there). First shop I went into the woman said, "Hi MrsDoyle, how's your mum?" In the bank, the teller clocked my name and said, "Aww, I used to babysit you!" I got a big hit of the claustrophobia that drove me away in the first place.