Why grown ups get homesick too

Insecurity, anxiety, panic. It happens to the best of us.

I was eight years old when I got snowed in at my auntie’s cottage in Gloucestershire. I had gone to visit my cousins and was supposed to be staying for one night. Even one night away from home was a big deal to me at that age. I would miss my mum, feel anxious and get tearful quite easily. I was not a very chilled kid, to be honest.

When I came downstairs after a fretful night of sleep in my aunt’s cottgae I was alarmed by what I saw outside. Deep white snow as far as the eye could see. My aunt’s place was nestled inside a picturesque Cotswold valley. The snow rolled on and on across fields and up hillsides. It was like the whole world had been encased in sugar. It might have been one of the most beautiful things I’d ever seen but I was only focussed on the deep sense of foreboding that had crash landed in the pit of my stomach.

“Isn’t it exciting?!” my auntie beamed. “We’re snowed in! What an adventure! We won’t be able to leave the house for days! It will be just like camping!”

I did not think this news was exciting. I was not in the mood for adventure. And even at the age of eight I already knew I fucking hated camping. My infant mind was thrown into state of mild-trauma. It was horrible. I had to fight back the tears and paint on a smile to reassure my auntie that I was okay.

It’s funny the way we spend so much time when we’re kids trying to reassure adults. You’d think it would work the other way round. But I remember constantly putting on elaborate performances to convince grown ups that I was perfectly okay even when I wasn’t. I’m not sure where that shit comes from. Maybe I just thought it would break my auntie’s heart if she knew how absolutely fucking desperate I was go home.

I called my mum at work to tell her I wouldn’t be able to come home until the snow thawed in a few days. My auntie and cousins sat around watching me. I tried desperately to sound happy on the phone. But my mum knew me well enough to know that the situation would have sent me into a tailspin.

“Are you sure you’re alright Sam?” she asked.

“Sure!” I said through a manic grin, my eyes beginning to sting as I fought to hold it together. “It’s exciting! In fact, it’s just like campiiiiiiiiiiiiinnnnnnnnnnnnngg.”

With that, my voice cracked then ascended into a high-pitched wale. Tears followed, with the snot bubbles close behind. Reader, I had fucking lost the plot over a bit of snow.

I know exactly what I sounded like because, to this day, my auntie still does a fucking funny impression of the episode. She was kind to me at the time but I discovered, years later, that she had low-key found the whole thing absolutely hilarious. I suppose it was. But I was absolutely distraught. Why? I’m still not sure. Did I think we would run out of food and die there? Maybe. Was I really that desperate to swap my auntie’s cosy country cottage for my tiny, freezing council house on the side of the A4? Seems unlikely.

I think I was generally anxious as a kid because there wasn’t a whole lot of stability in my life. My dad had left, our house was a bananas menagerie of local waifs, strays, drunks and yobs. My mum tried her best to keep things on a level but it wasn’t easy with four boys to raise alone and only the Family Allowance to do it on. She’d have occasional boyfriends who would make cameo appearances in the home then disappear as mysteriously as they had arrived. To eight year old me it all seemed chaotic and unsettling. I think I became conditioned to believe that life was inherently unstable and a bit dangerous. When anything unforeseen occurred I was quick to assume the worst. I probably thought that by the time the snow thawed and I got back to London my family would have disappeared, the would have new people living in it, someone would be dead or I’d have a horrible new dad.

The famous psychoanalyst John Bowlby called it attachment theory. The idea is that a child needs to develop a secure emotional relationship with care-givers in order to enjoy normal social and emotional development. I’ve been reading up a bit about it this week because I have been reflecting on why, for such a long time, I was so easily thrown into a state of turmoil by even the smallest disruptions in my life. Or, to put it another way, why I got so fucking homesick all the time

I hesitated to write about homesickness this week. Because the term alone sounds so babyish and pathetic. It’s not a proper grown up mental disorder like PTSD, is it? PTSD is what SAS veterans suffer from after seeing stuff that can never be unseen in the midst of brutal jungle conflicts. Homesickness is what a skittish child gets when it unexpectedly snows during a trip to the Cotswolds. It feels embarrassing to talk about it.

I still got homesick when I was a teenager. I would go away on lads-trips (sorry, but that was what we called holidays with friends in the nineties) to party resorts on the continent and spend all day moping about in my hotel room, wishing I was back home eating beans on toast and watching Neighbours. I would feel anxious and unhappy for 70% of the time I was there, my discomfort compounded by the need to conceal melancholy beneath an exhausting ‘Oi oi saveloy!’ Brits-on-tour charade. The only respite was night time when I would go down the disco and drink away the bad feelings until dawn. It’s really not that complicated to work out why I developed a drink problem later in life.

Even when I got older the homesickness still lingered. When I was 26 I was living with my girlfriend in Notting Hill. I had my own weekly show on national TV. A magazine hired me to go on a road trip from LA to Las Vegas with Chris Moyles and his Radio One show. All I had to do was go there, get pissed, interview Moyles a bit, write it up and then fly back to present my TV show on the Saturday. For a 26 year old journalist things couldn’t have been going much better.

I must admit, the week in California was a great laugh at times. While we were in LA I got to interview John Lydon on Venice Beach. We even went to a party at Playboy Mansion (I might write about that in more detail some other time). After that we drove in convoy across the Nevada desert, Moyles in a vintage jag, me behind in a people carrier, all the way to Vegas where we partied some more in between bleary eyed radio shows (actually, I never even bothered turning up for the show because I was too jet-lagged and hungover).

I mean, fuck me, what a week. I am quite aware that I sound like an entitled, moaning prick to have anything negative to say about an experience like that. But almost the whole point of The Reset is to confess to stuff that I might once have been ashamed of. Just to get it out, drop the tiring pretence that I was ‘totally okay’ and maybe give a few people something to relate to. I accept that a lot of you will nevertheless be thinking ‘nope, sorry, can’t relate, check your privilege you fucking baby.’ And that’s fair.

But the truth is that, despite everything seeming so cool and exciting during that week in America, I was consumed by an unspecific anxiety and desire to go home the whole time I was there. I was worried and panicked - but very skilled at pretending to be the opposite. Again, alcohol provided the only relief. As soon as I felt the anxiety start to rise up inside of me I hit the booze hard. After all, that was half the point I was there.

You can see the pattern. I felt insecure, scared and uncomfortable when I was out of my comfort zone. I was overwhelmed by circumstances that I felt I really should have been able to handle. This made me feel ashamed. Hiding all of that made me tired and even more anxious. Alcohol was the quick and easy way to dispel everything. Drink was a cure-all - the only safety blanket I needed. And over time I became entirely dependent on it to navigate my way through life, especially when things got a bit fast paced and exciting.

It’s ironic that I tried to build my career around the pursuit of exciting, unfamiliar and adventurous experiences. But that I was so unable to cope emotionally with those experiences that I had to use alcohol to get me through them.

Now I am 46. I still like the odd bit of excitement but the desire has lessened over time. I’ve done loads of mad shit in my life. I’ve done all the drinking and snorting anyone could ever possibly have the urge to do and more. I’ve tried most of the things that film and TV tell you are sensational and discovered that 75% of them aren’t nearly what they’re cracked up to be (Playboy Mansion included).

But now I have been sober for six years I can, at last, handle being out of my comfort zone. I have spent enough time sorting out my inner demons, working out where my insecurities came from and developing skills to combat them without booze or drugs. Plus, I have a wife and two kids that represent everything that matters in my life. I can be on the other side of the world, all alone or surrounded by strangers and have inner peace. Because I know they are there waiting for me when I get home. I know they’re not going anywhere. I know my life has love at the centre of it and all the other stuff that happens on the fringes is just transient. Sometimes it’s fun, sometimes it’s shit but none of it really matters. Life is an adventure. You could almost say it’s just like camping.

The Reset Extra With Seth Meyers

Apologies for no podcast this week. However, I did put out my interview with US comedy legend Seth Meyers to reset Extra subscribers. If you’d like to subscribe, listen to my chat with Seth and get a whole bunch of other exclusive content, I am offering a 15% discount for the first year for this weekend only.

If not, no worries, I will still be doing these newsletters every Friday for free and usual free-to-air Wednesday podcasts will resume next week.

Either way, thanks for being part of this stuff.

Some services, links and phone numbers to help you through the tough times

https://www.samaritans.org/ Tel 116 123

@calm 0800 58 58 58

@YoungMindsUK 0800 018 2138

@ChairtySane 0300 304 7000

https://www.alcoholics-anonymous.org.uk/

https://cocaineanonymous.org.uk/

https://andysmanclub.co.uk/