Self-Via-Echolocation and the Ache of Existential Homesickness

By Dr. Patty Gently on October 22, 2025

“The soul has been given its own ears to hear things the mind does not understand.” —Rumi

Bright Insight Support Network founder and president Dr. Patricia Gently supports gifted and twice-exceptional adults in their own autopsychotherapy through identity exploration, structured reflection, and alignment with inner values. A writer, educator, and 2e adult, Dr. Patty centers depth, integrity, and complexity in all aspects of her work.

Enjoy this and other posts by @thegentleheretic on Substack!

The Resonant Self

The soul has ears

that listen through the ribs

and the hollow of distance

where sound is a knowing.

We send ourselves outward

a pulse in a question

a tone that grazes the edge

and returns a map of someone

drawn in echoes.

Between the signal and its return

is the ache

a faint hum of homesickness

for something unborn.

It is not absence we grieve

it is the call of coherence

the soulsong that says:

“You are still seeking home

by the way your own voice

comes back to you.”

(Patty Gently, 2025)

Some aspects of identity are sculpted in silent spaces. Others are revealed through resonance. We send signals into the world in the form of words, gestures, presences, and receive back the reverberations of what they touch. This self-via-echolocation is the subtle art of knowing who we are by noticing how the world responds.

And this type of learning and knowing is not limited to explicit feedback. The echo may arrive as tone, timing, warmth, tension, or the energy that lingers after a conversation. It may be seen in the people who feel drawn to us or those whose spirits bristle against ours. For those who perceive pattern and nuance keenly, these signals form a dynamic and ever-evolving map of identity. They reveal how we occupy space in the collective field and how that space shifts in different relational climates.

Sometimes these reverberations are clear, and sometimes they cast confusion. When reflections are authentic and congruent, the self may feel sharply outlined. When they are distorted, absent, or contradictory, the self can blur and edges may seem absent or uncertain. For a permeable system, this can feel deeply disorienting. The phenomenon is not a dependence on others for definition, though. It is participation in an ongoing relational dialogue where both presence and relational white space means something. And two people in a dyad are both transmitter and receiver, signal and echo with boundaries that clarify in the waves that return.

A Longing Beyond

This inward turn continues naturally from the relational resonance that precedes it, as the echoes that shape our sense of self also awaken the quieter longing that underlies them. Running parallel to this outward process, that is, is an inner ache of existential homesickness. It is not nostalgia for a particular place or past but for a state of coherence that feels half-remembered. The experience can surface in stillness, in moments of awe, or in the presence of deep empathy. It is the sense that something essential once felt whole and has since gone missing, though it is not clear that it ever existed (or could).

This homesickness is not inherently sorrowful. It is a directional pull or compass calibrated toward integration and integrity. It beckons us toward authenticity, to reclaim the exiled or fragmented aspects of self that never find safe harbor. Many feel it as an unnamed yearning for alignment with something more real than the current moment allows or for alien others who may not exist. It can lead us to quietly question our own existence, a thought that seems to echo and ache beneath the longing itself.

Where the echolocation of self depends on outer feedback, existential homesickness calls us inward, reminding us that home is a verb as much as a place: the continuous act of reaching to what is true.

A Convergence

Together, an understanding of self-via-echolocation and existential homesickness helps with the process of integration found through an oscillation between outward resonance and inward coherence. We reach out to situate ourselves in the world and turn inward to align with what feels true. And, as autopsychotherapy, this dialectic echoes outward to subjectively locate and objectively see self while turning inward to reunite with the deeper coordinates of being. The first keeps us relational; the second keeps us authentic.

Without resonance from the outer world, we risk isolation or distortion. Without inner orientation, we risk becoming a composite of borrowed reflections. Between them lies a living selfhood and interplay between belonging and becoming.

At the apex of this convergence is the realization that we do not end the homesickness or seek to quiet the echoes. We value them rather as navigational tools that remind us we are still in motion and that this motion leaves traces of existence in relation and beyond it.