...if you dig into people who are depressed you often find that their distress at some level is linked to a sense of not fitting in, an anxiety about belonging: displacement anguish.
. . . .
James Wood writes [in a recent essay in The London Review of Books, called “On Not Going Home,”]: “Freud has a wonderful word, ‘afterwardness,’ which I need to borrow, even at the cost of kidnapping it from its very different context. To think about home and the departure from home, about not going home and no longer feeling able to go home, is to be filled with a remarkable sense of ‘afterwardness’: It is too late to do anything about it now, and too late to know what should have been done. And that may be all right.”
Yes, being not quite home, acceptance, which may be bountiful, is what is left to us.
~Roger Cohen, The New York Times, April 3, 2014 "In Search of Home"