Do we sometimes experience feelings of hiraeth to cover a gap in our emotional vocabulary? I am not sure. Sometimes it comes out of the recall of experiences we can’t fully articulate.Īre memories faulty – yes. Looked at through a sceptic’s eyes hiraeth can indeed be part of personal myth making, a sort of skewed storytelling. Such thoughts are a useful reality check although I think the Welsh language has offered us a gift of a word in many ways. Some say that ‘hiraeth’ is a myth – a sort of false memory syndrome – a longing for something that never really existed. They often said “sweet sadness” or “wistfulness”.įor me it evokes primarily longing but it’s more complex than that.

Pamela Petro, in her wonderful memoir, ‘The Long Field’, asked friends what state of being they associated with hiraeth. Sometimes hiraeth also prompts us to ask the question where is home? When you live in a form of exile from Wales the emotions associated with hiraeth are more powerful and each visit back( several times a year) are driven by hiraeth.

When I started to talk to different people I realised all sorts of feelings of loss, longing and nostalgia came up for them. Inevitably I found myself called back by hiraeth and tried to understand what the word means. When I told a friend I was undertaking this project they said ‘dig deep’ as it was the only way to conduct this process of self examination alongside a journey to uncover what Wales meant and continues to mean to me. Hunt via PixabayĪs I’ve been writing my memoir ‘Going Back’ mixed emotions rise to the surface.

The distance between us a memoir