Homesickness and Emotional Complexity
Immigration, by its deep nature, involves leaving behind familiar environments, routines, and loved ones – friends, family and pets. This journey is frequently paired with a profound feeling of homesickness, a longing for the comfort of our former lives. The 2015 Pixar film Inside Out offers a deep journey of the emotional details that accompany major life changes, and it provides a relatable framework for understanding the immigrant experience. By examining homesickness through the lens of the movie’s description of emotions, we can better appreciate the depth and complexity of this feelings.
Homesickness: The Immigrant Experience
For immigrants, homesickness is more than a shallow sense of nostalgia. It can be an overwhelming emotional experience that affects daily life, mental health, and the ability to adapt to a new environment. The physical distance from home often comes with a sense of dislocation, as immigrants try to adjust to new cultures, languages, and customs while holding on to their memories and ties to their homecountry.
Many times, it manifests as a deep longing for the familiar things — foods, places, smells, and sounds of home. Additionally, it can emerge feelings of guilt and sadness as they struggle with the realities of leaving a whole life behind. This emotional mess is amplified by the challenge of creating a new identity in a foreign country, where the social support networks are often limited, and the sense of belonging can feel intangible.
Emotional Complexity in Inside Out
Inside Out offers a brilliant representation of how emotions shape our life experiences. The story centers around Riley, an 11-year-old girl who moves from Minnesota to San Francisco with her parents. Much like an immigrant, Riley faces a huge transition, leaving behind her home, friends, and everything familiar to her. The movie introduces us to five primary emotions — Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger, and Disgust—who collectively rule Riley’s responses to this turnaround in life.
Firstly, Joy tries to dominate Riley’s emotional world, attempting to suppress Sadness in order to keep Riley happy every time. However, as the story goes on, it becomes clear that Joy alone can’t handle the complexities of Riley’s emotional world. Sadness, in particular, plays a crucial role in helping Riley process the extent of her life changes. By the end of the movie, the merging of Joy and Sadness symbolizes the realization that acknowledging and embracing a range of emotions is essential for emotional health.
Homesickness Through the Lens of Inside Out
If I was to personify homesickness on Inside Out‘s emotional structure, it would be a complex blend of the characters Joy, Sadness, and Fear. Immigrants, just like Riley, have to navigate the joy of new opportunities together with the sadness of leaving behind loved ones and familiar places. Joy represents the moments of hope and excitement when discovering new experiences in the new country, such as learning new customs, trying new food or achieving personal goals. Yet, this joy is often diluded by a persistent sadness — a longing for the past and the comforts of her old home.
Sadness, in the context of homesickness, plays an important role. Just as in Inside Out, where Sadness helps Riley reconnect with her emotions and accept her new reality, immigrants often need to acknowledge and process their feelings of loss in order to fully adjust to their new life. Denying sadness, or pushing it aside, can prolong the emotional chaos and make adaptation more difficult.
Fear is another critical part of homesickness. It represents the anxiety that comes with the unknown — whether it’s learning a new culture, struggling to communicate in a new language, renting a place or facing the uncertainties of finding work and making a living. Fear can sometimes make the adjustment process feel overwhelming, but it can also serve as a protective mechanism, helping immigrants stay alert and adapt to their new context.
The Role of Nostalgia: A Bittersweet Companion
Nostalgia, a sort of Joy mixed with Sadness, is a huge aspect of homesickness. The longing for home is regularly filled with memories of comfort and happiness, but those memories are blended with the pain of separation. This is accurate demonstrated in Inside Out when Riley remembers her life in Minnesota — her memories are a mix of joyful days (i.e. like playing hockey) and the pain of knowing she can’t return to that exact moment in time.
For immigrants, nostalgia can be a source of comfort and also a heavy burden to carry. It offers a mental escape to happier times, but it can also increase the awareness of what stayed behind. Much like in the movie, where Riley learns to appreciate her past while embracing her future, immigrants often find themselves trying to balance between holding onto their past and making room for new experiences in the new country.
Resilience: A New Emotional Balance
The movie teaches us that resilience comes from accepting the full spectrum of emotions. Riley’s journey consists in learning that Sadness and Joy can exist simultaneously, that Fear, Anger, and Disgust have their place in shaping her life experiences also. For immigrants, resilience is similarly built through the acceptance of homesickness as a key and natural part of the whole process. Just as Riley learns to integrate her emotions into a new, more complex understanding of herself, immigrants must merge their memories and emotions into their new lives.
Over time, homesickness often (and hopefully!) transforms. The emotions associated with it may not entirely go away, but they become part of a more balanced emotional context. Immigrants, like Riley, commonly find a way to create new “core memories” — positive experiences in their new life that blend the old with the new, helping to ease the pains of homesickness and build a sense of belonging.
Lessons learned: Better Immigrant Experience
In Inside Out, Pixar demonstrates the importance of embracing all emotions as essential parts of the human life experience. For the immigrants, homesickness is a multifaceted blend of emotions that combines Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger and Disgust. The movie’s message resonates deeply with the immigrant experience, showing that it is through acknowledging and processing these complex emotions that we find the strength to adapt, grow, and create different and transformed identities in unfamiliar places. Homesickness, like the emotional journey depicted in Inside Out, is a reflection of the resilience of the human spirit.
Our Immigrant Journey in VWDS: An inside perspective
Every person’s experience when moving to a new country is unique, shaped by their life circumstances, expectations, emotional intelligence, and support network. This diversity makes it challenging to create a one-size-fits-all approach to support.
From job acceptance to my very first day in Portugal and up to today, I’ve been fortunate to receive incredible support from our Happiness and People Support Teams, Engineering Managers and amazing colleagues, which has made a significant difference compared to some friends’ experiences with other companies. Beyond this initial help, the multicultural environment at VWDS has been invaluable. With colleagues from all around the globe, wellcoming and guiding through the very hard steps of bureaucratic hurdles and everyday tasks like buying furniture, choosing cable service, locating pet stores, pet sitters and house cleaners.
Being an immigrant is undeniably tough, and anyone who says otherwise is not being honest. You will miss your family and friends deeply. However, you will also have the opportunity to make new connections if you embrace and open yourself to your new life. While no one will be a childhood friend or will give you that motherly hug that you so long for, over time, you will discover new sources of comfort and companionship.
Happiness often comes from where you place your efforts. Be patient, seek help when needed, get professional support, and accept the gray days. Just like in Inside Out, brighter days will surely come in the end.