Gemma Spake

It is wired into our DNA and into our way of being to have a home base or to have some environment or some space where we feel our safest and where we can just switch off for the day, for the month, for the hour.

That is why we literally have something called place attachment theory.

This idea from psychologists and scientists that we form deep emotional bonds with places.

That is something that we are hardwired to do.

The same way that we form deep emotional bonds with people.

And like people, certain places become part of who you are.

They become...

part of how you see yourself.

They hold really precious memories.

They hold your routines.

They hold your sense of safety.

They also are what hold our default self, the person that we are at our core, the person we most naturally become when we feel our safest.

normally at home, even for nomads, right?

Even for people who give the impression of needing nothing, just like the wide open space, like the wide open road, the wide open spaces are for them home.

There is not a human alive that doesn't have some or need some kind of environmental or external consistency, even if that consistency is inconsistency.

So when you leave those spaces and say goodbye, when you leave home, when you move city, it is like a breakup.

It's like a death.

Your brain has to reprogram where to go to feel safe, what we can and can't trust, what makes us feel good, what feels normal for us now whilst managing the pain and the loss and the pain of nostalgia.

Nostalgia and homesickness, by the way, incredibly similar emotions.

Something you may not know, the word nostalgia was initially created as a medical diagnostic term for sailors who were suffering from homesickness.