Hiraeth
Home is often described as a place where we feel familiarity, belonging, and nostalgia. A place for our roots to grow and thrive. It's often in the form of a structure, like a house or an apartment, and it often involves family by whom we feel loved unconditionally. Maybe there's a lot of memories associated with these things and, when we become homesick, we compare our immediate environment with said memories. Sometimes we see home as a person, and sometimes we see home as a city or a country or a neighborhood. Sometimes these ideas of home are an illusion. At least they were for me. What I experience now is not homesickness but something called "hiraeth." Hiraeth is a word I came across recently after encountering a difficult situation at work about a month ago. It's of Welsh origin and doesn't have a direct translation to English, but it can nonetheless best be described as a deep longing for a pre-colonized Wales. A longing for the way things once were. W...