O-Week in fall 2022 was such a whirlwind. Truthfully, I don’t remember much of it. Moving in was a blur of heavy bags and aching shoulders. The one welcome event I recall is an event at the Museum of Science and Industry, where I walked from one exhibit to another, eating a delicious chocolate brownie. However, there is one moment that will be lodged in my brain forever: standing on the street in front of Burton-Judson, holding a Trader Joe’s bag, and watching my parents drive away.
Once I couldn’t see their car anymore, I walked back inside, scanned my new UCID, and went up to my room. I closed the door behind me, and then there was silence. I felt a gaping pit in my stomach that would become a defining feature of much of my early college experience. The room was unfamiliar in a way that wasn’t simply physical.

When I woke up the next morning, the pit was still there. It was like a hole in the foundation of what made me me. I couldn’t recognize myself in this strange place, surrounded by new people, constantly wishing I were home.

The next day, the first day of classes, I woke up at 7:30 a.m. for my 9:30 a.m. sosc class. I got to Cobb 30 minutes early, sat on the floor outside the classroom, and texted my mom the question that I would be asking her and myself for a long time: When will this feeling go away?
Sometimes, the feeling was dramatic, leading to panic attacks, but, most of the time, it wasn’t. It was just always there. It didn’t matter whether I was in class, at dinner in Cathey, or sitting and laughing with people in my house. The feeling would never leave.

For the first time in my 18 years of life, I noticed the weight of time. If I could barely get through four weeks, how would I manage four years?
I tried all the conventional ways of conquering homesickness—joining RSOs, going to house events, and avoiding the silence of my room by studying as late as I could in Harper. I leaned on advice I received from family and the internet: wait six months. That’s how long it takes to become familiar with the unfamiliar. I’m not sure where that number came from, but I held onto it.

I would scroll through Reddit, reading dozens of comments that described similar situations. It helped to know I wasn’t the only one, but it didn’t make the feeling go away.

At the end of March, six months had come and gone, but nothing had changed. No switch flipped. That was the part that scared me the most: not that it was hard, but that it wasn’t getting easier, as I had been assured it would. At that point, I considered leaving to be closer to home. I started filling out transfer applications, but when it came time to hit the “submit” button, I never could. I always believed with steady conviction that UChicago was the right place for me (and, spoiler alert, I still think it is).

I kept trying to figure out exactly what the problem was. I thought that if I approached this problem logically and figured out exactly what I was missing, I could patch over the pit. I even tried therapy, hoping someone could explain why this felt so hard. But I was impatient. I wanted a quick fix, not a long process that might have a happy ending.

As I finished out my first year and returned for my second, I realized that it wasn’t just that I missed home. It was something harder to name. It was a kind of fear—not of anything in particular but of everything being unfamiliar, all the time. Of not having anything that was grounding. I was struggling to build a home away from home. But how was I supposed to do that? And those fears grew into larger concerns. Could I ever build a home away from home? If not, what would that mean for my future?

So, I went into autopilot. I focused on classes and leaned a lot on the constants in my life, even though that was the opposite of what everyone says college students should do. I always went to the same dining hall, no matter where my classes were on campus (Cathey, I can’t thank you enough for your consistency but also for your experimentation with the dessert station), stayed in on-campus housing, worked out in the gym in RGGRC, and got either Asada bowls or Paks sushi from Hutchinson Commons. Eventually, the sense of unfamiliarity became less consistent. The feeling flared up, but these touchpoints began to make the campus feel more familiar.

People talk a lot about building a home away from home, but no one really tells you what that means or how to do it. I didn’t understand it until much later, when I signed up for my biggest challenge yet: studying abroad in Vienna in the spring of my third year. Yes, I had eventually managed to feel comfortable on campus, but it had taken two and a half years. Study abroad would last a quick nine weeks. At best, I expected the experience to be manageable. At worst, I imagined it would be a lot like those first few weeks and months at UChicago, but this time, I wouldn’t be able to drive home. I’d be an ocean away from Ohio. Another place, another reset, right?

But I never imagined studying abroad would actually be fun. I never imagined I’d be able to both participate in the program and enjoy every minute of it, from the museums to the operas and the concerts. I even took solo trips around the city and beyond. The unfamiliarity didn’t feel as sharp. It felt recognizable. I had gone through this before.

For the first time, I was okay with being uncomfortable long enough to actually experience everything else. I stopped waiting for the feeling to disappear and started trusting that I could exist with it.

That’s when I realized that building a home isn’t about the place itself. It’s about the confidence that you can build one at all.
I’m not here to tell you there’s a cure for homesickness. There isn’t. But I do think it can be reframed.

For me, homesickness was a kind of fear—the fear of unfamiliarity, of not being grounded. And fear doesn’t just go away in a few weeks or in six months. But, at the same time, it also isn’t supposed to spiral.

What helped was finding small anchor points: the same dining hall, the same side of campus, and the same foods. We’re told that college is about trying new things, and it is. But it’s also okay to hold onto a few constants. Those constants can make the unfamiliar feel manageable.

And over those first two-and-a-half years of college, something else changed. Not all at once, and not on a neat six-month timeline. Gradually, I started to feel less like I was waiting for something to click and more like I was building something, piece by piece.

It takes longer than you think, but, once you’ve done it once, you carry that experience with you. The next time things are unfamiliar, it won’t exactly be easier, but it will be more manageable because you know you’ve done it before.

I’m writing this for my past self who spent hours scrolling on Reddit, trying to figure out if this feeling was normal—for the version of myself who kept hearing that it would go away soon and wondering why it hadn’t.

We hear a lot about the best parts of college—the connections, the excitement, and the times that feel effortless. And even when we do hear about the tough parts, we don’t hear that they last longer than a few months. It’s often reduced to reassurance that it will pass quickly.

Sometimes it doesn’t. That doesn’t mean you’re doing anything wrong. It doesn’t mean you’re in the wrong place. It just means that you’re in the middle of something that takes time. Trust that you will gain the confidence to build a home wherever you go.

Naina Purushothaman is a fourth-year in the College and a former senior News reporter for the Maroon.