I was told about you. In my first week of absolute joy here in Chile, a friend who’d studied here before warned me about you. “You’re happy now,” she told me. “But for us last year, it was the three month mark. At three months we were all really homesick.”

And now, at three months to the day, I find myself aching a bit more than before. I’m thinking about home, and my friends there, my family there, the life that is sitting in wait for my return. I miss my dog, and hugs from the arms of those who mean the most to me. I miss shopping at Target with my mom, judging awful clothes with my best friends, grabbinaburr and laughing the night away with my friends.

A part of me even misses my work back home — my work that I claim to abhor back when I’m in the thick of it. I miss driving and meeting new people, strategizing and criticizing the idiocy of our government with people who understand what’s happening in the same way I do. I miss feeling like I’m good at something, or at the very least, like I’m learning to be good at something.

And, God, I miss being able to understand people. In the words of Kate Nash, I hate not being able to articulate precisely what I want to say, it drives me crazy. Every single day is a struggle to be understood and to understand the world around me. In this struggle, there is no eavesdropping, there’s no chatting up random strangers, and there´s the fear that I’ll get stuck in a pickle with no way to explain the problem or talk myself out of it. That’s a seriously scary idea.

It’s not that I’m not learning the language — I definitely am. However, really learning, absorbing, and understanding the language requires a bit more than simply being around it or learning vocabulary. Well, knock me over. I really thought it would be that simple.

A couple of weeks ago, I was telling someone a story. I was taking a ferry from Seattle to the Tacoma area, but had accidentally boarded the wrong ferry. I ended up on Vashon Island. My friend asked me what I did about it. Simple: I told the man who sold tickets my dilemma. He told me to wait for 25 minutes and the ferry I needed would take me the rest of the way.

As I told the story, I thought inwardly, “How on earth was I able to communicate with this man? How was I able to tell him my dilemma and understand his solution? I don’t even know the word ‘ferry’ in Spanish!”

And then I remember: right, he was speaking English. Because in the US, everyone speaks the same language that I do. In the US, if my doorman were to call and tell me my door was open, I would close my door, rather than simply hang up the phone and stare at it in confusion. Why did he keep saying “door” and “open”? It wouldn’t take two minutes for that simple sentence to click back home.

It’s easy for me to write all of these problems off and focus on the good I’ve built for myself here. I have a great apartment with an awesome, totally agreeable roommate. I have a bunch of really great friends. I have fun and laughter and learning around me every single day.

But the honest truth is that I´m starting to really miss my home. The heartache is becoming a bit more nagging and a bit more steady with each day. I miss it every single day and I think about it every single day.

I’m not sad, though. Not at all. I’m not sad to be here and I’m not sad to have this experience. It’s an odd thing, really — to miss everything at home even though I’m genuinely happy where I am. I have a beautiful life at home. And I have a beautiful life here in Santiago.

Yesterday, one of the TIPS that I work with asked me, as I watched her pack up her things from her last class, “Are you in a slump? I’m in a slump.” We proceeded to talk for a bit and she mentioned that the three-month slump is universal with the people in her program. And then she said, “But it has me thinking a lot about my purpose here. You know, like, what the hell am I doing here?”

And I couldn’t have said it any more clearly. What the hell am I doing here?

When I first left, I claimed to have no purpose. I claimed that I simply wanted to come here because my favorite writers inspired the idea.

I’m not saying that isn’t true, not by a long shot. Isabel Allende and Mark Twain definitely lit the spark. But they didn’t start the fire.

What did? What on earth made me abandon my family and friends during some of the most exciting times in their lives so that I could live in this little ribbon of a country? What the hell am I doing here?

Despite my constantly running mind, I haven’t yet figured it out. Maybe I will tomorrow. Or next week. Maybe it won’t become clear until I leave here, seven months from now. Maybe it’ll be a couple of years after that.

Or, maybe, despite my thinking about it and writing about it and obsessing about it — maybe it’ll never become clear. And maybe that’s okay, too.

My friend said something else. “By the time we got to five months in, all we could think was ‘why the hell did we spend so much time being homesick three months in?'”

I’m sure I’ll get to that point. For now, I just gotta ride out the slump. Shouldn’t be too difficult. I’ve been ready for it, after all.