How does the diaspora really feel about summer in Kosovo?

I don’t know what Germany looks like in the summer. I’ve never seen it. From the first day of summer break to the last, I was in Kosovo. Every year. No exceptions.

And for a long time, I was a little jealous.

My friends would come back from Italy, the south of France, wherever, with tans and stories and photos that looked like postcards. I’d come back with a suitcase full of Albanian food, sunburn from sitting outside until midnight, and no idea what a “vacation” was supposed to feel like, because mine never looked like theirs.

I used to ask myself why.

Why couldn’t summer just be a beach somewhere new, like everyone else’s?

Why did it always have to be the same place, the same relatives, the same plastic chairs outside the same house?

I think I can finally answer that question for the version of me who used to ask it.

It was never really about the place

Nostalgia gets a bad reputation.

It sounds like something sentimental, maybe even a little sad: a longing for something that’s gone.

But researchers who study it have found something different.

Nostalgia doesn’t just make us miss the past, it makes us feel more like ourselves.

One study found that nostalgic reflection increases a sense of authenticity, of being aligned with who we really are, and that this is part of why it boosts wellbeing rather than just being a wistful ache.

That’s the part nobody tells you about growing up between two countries. The yearly trip home isn’t really about escaping somewhere new. It’s about returning to the version of yourself that only exists there. The one who speaks the language without translating it in her head first. The one whose name is pronounced correctly without anyone asking twice.

Why the homeland trip is different from a vacation

There’s an entire body of research on what’s sometimes called diaspora tourism or “roots travel”: children and grandchildren of immigrants returning to the place their parents came from.

What researchers consistently find is that these trips aren’t experienced as tourism at all.

They’re experienced as identity work.

Second-generation visitors describe going back not to see sights, but to understand their family’s history, to feel less like a guest in their own story, and to reconcile two versions of home that otherwise stay separate all year.

For many people in the Albanian diaspora, this is the unspoken shape of every summer. Not a holiday. Something closer to maintenance. Reconnecting with a version of you, you forgot you had.

That’s the jealousy I felt as a kid, looked at honestly: my friends were having a vacation.

I was doing something else entirely, something with no name, that just felt like an obligation at the time.

Nobody tells a ten-year-old that what she’s doing has a word for it, let alone that it’s something her nervous system needed.

What family actually does to us

The third piece is the one that’s easiest to underestimate: the people.

Research on children of immigrants consistently shows that family cohesion, simply staying closely connected to extended family and community, acts as a protective factor for mental health.

It buffers against loneliness, supports self-efficacy, and gives children a stable sense of identity even when the world around them keeps shifting.

Family closeness specifically softens the effects of exclusion and disorientation that diaspora kids often carry quietly through the rest of the year.

In practice, that protection doesn’t look clinical at all. It looks like your grandmother’s kitchen. It looks like fifteen cousins showing up uninvited and welcome anyway. It looks like being fed before you’ve even said hello.

None of that shows up in a vacation brochure, but it does something that a beach in the south of France never could: it tells a child, every single summer, exactly where she belongs.

What nobody talks about: coming back

But there’s something nobody really talks about. The feeling when you return.

Not homesickness exactly. Something quieter than that. A kind of numbness that settles in after the flight, after the suitcase is unpacked, after life picks back up exactly where it left off.

You’re back in the country where you live, where your routine is, where your future probably is. And yet something feels off. Because somewhere on that trip, without really deciding it, you understood that home, the constitutional one, the one on your documents, the one you return to every August and leave every year, is not the same as the home your chest reaches for.

That distinction is one of the quietest and most disorienting things about growing up in the diaspora. Both places are real. Both hold parts of you. But neither holds all of you, and at some point you stop expecting them to.

The numbness after coming back isn’t a weakness. It’s what it feels like to love something you can only visit.

And for many people, it’s a feeling that sits just below the surface of everyday life, unspoken, unnamed, and heavier than it needs to be.

If that feeling is familiar to you, or if it gets heavier than it should, Mendje is a space to talk through exactly that. With someone who understands what you really feel.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not replace professional psychological support.

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