How To Describe the Feeling Of A Homecoming

As a positive: Being able to completely relax and turn off your busy mind, a weight being lifted, feeling like you can fully breath, like floating in a calm pool of water, being accepted and loved for who you are, being at peace.
As a negative: high anxiety and trepidation, being judge for every decision you have made, not being accepted for who you are, love is conditional if given.

 

Hmmm - your title says "How to describe the feeling of a homecoming" but your text says something different. Assuming that the title is right, a homecoming would depend on the character and the circumstances. What is the character's home like, and what was their experience there? Someone returning to a beloved home after a harrowing experience overseas would be different from someone returning to their hometown to face the demons of something terrible that happened there. Personality plays a part too - a quaint, small town might be a relaxing, friendly place to one person; but to another might be a stifling, backwards backwater. Who is there? Do they have no family left, or a bevy of loving relatives? Their ex-spouse, or their old flame? Also, has their home changed? Is the quaint small town they remembered now a soulless suburb; or a rundown, dying ghost town?

 

The ones that stick most in my mind in life were bittersweet. Returning somewhere you once lived, or were born, after many years away and finding so much has changed. That the stores, streets, people etc are all strange to you. It can see like no time has passed and there is a joy in the act of "going home" but inevitably, our memories of it as it was are often not what we return to.

 

I’ll add from some personal experience. After coming back from combat tours a few times, it is a strange feeling. You feel like you have been gone for years, and feels like things have changed while you were away. Even though every case was only 7 months or so and most people don’t notice changes in that time. Often very little changes, but you have so much everything feels different.