Nobody warned me that the hardest month wouldn’t be the first one. The first month, everything is new enough to be distracting — you’re too busy figuring out how the trams work and where to buy rice to sit still with any big feelings. The hardest month, for me, was my first November in Germany, when the sun started setting before 5pm and I realized I hadn’t felt genuinely warm, in either sense of the word, in weeks.

There’s a specific kind of homesickness that comes from missing things you didn’t know you’d miss. Not the big obvious things — I expected to miss my family, the food, the noise of home. What caught me off guard was missing small textures of daily life: the sound of a jeepney, the particular chaos of a wet market, being able to greet a stranger in Bisaya and have them understand exactly what you meant, tone and all. Winter made all of that feel further away, because the physical world around me — gray, quiet, early dark — offered no reminders of home at all.

What actually helped wasn’t fighting it. It was building small deliberate rituals that gave the feeling somewhere to go — a weekly video call with my family at a fixed time, cooking a Filipino dish every Sunday even when I had to substitute half the ingredients, keeping a photo of home on my desk where I’d actually see it. I also found, almost by accident, that talking to other international students about it helped more than talking to people back home — they were living the same gray months, and there’s a relief in not having to explain the specific ache of a foreign winter to someone who’s never had one.

If your first hard month catches you off guard the way mine did: it’s not a sign you made the wrong choice. It’s just what adjusting actually feels like, on a timeline that doesn’t match the excitement of the first few weeks. It passes, and spring genuinely does make a difference — which sounds too simple to be true until you’ve lived through the season that came before it.