Interestingly, between the many places I’ve been around the
world, I have never written on what it’s like to return home. Some would
consider this the “final stage of culture shock,” or a “relief away from the
cultural intricacies of a foreign land.” However, I’ve found more and more that
returning home is more upsetting than moving to a new place. I’ll do my best to
summarize this emotional roller coaster in the most concise way possible, but
as with all emotional matters – the truth can’t be captured by mere mortal
words.
Everyone is the same, and you are not
Coming home can be a rude arrest
in your personal development. While living in a foreign country, you’re being
pushed to your limit. Sometimes you know what these limits are, and sometimes
you find new versions of yourself that you never knew existed – new context,
new you. In the midst of this flourishing personal discovery, you try your best
to keep in touch with family and friends back home. You update them on some of your
adventures, and you need them for a connection to what you left behind.
Sometimes your experiences are too hard to share adequately – either because
they’re too loaded with grief or are just plain bizarre - and you remain
silent. Either way, despite pathways of communication you’ll come home and find
your loved ones are in the same routine, same rut, same pattern. Best case
scenario, that consistency can be interpreted as security. Worst case scenario
(and very likely) the world has stagnated in your absence. Your friends haven’t
sat under the stars and shared your epiphanies. Your parents still try and nail
down a pseudo curfew. You’re a whole new person, and the world didn’t spin with
you.
Everything is different, and you weren’t there
Quite often, a traveler comes home
from weeks, months, or years in a new place – being inundated with new senses
and passions. “Home” has always been an immoveable, frustratingly normal place.
Home is predictable. And sometimes, when we’re in the field and overwhelmed
with sensory intake, a little boredom sounds like bliss. What better place for
that than home? So you book a ticket back for a little well earned R&R…Only
to find it didn’t wait for you. The orchard across the street from your house
has been uprooted in favor of a strip mall (which everyone condemns yet the
parking lot is always packed). Friends have ended relationships and formed new
ones. They're getting married and having kids. Meanwhile, your childhood room has been converted to a guest bedroom. Worse still,
your family has moved location entirely and your childhood memories are housed
across town while you fall asleep surrounded by loved ones and alien walls. You
go from being uprooted, to home and more uprooted.
The small things will be the death of you... but also the best thing ever...
With all these emotions swirling
and building, your barrier starts to lower and every interaction is raw. It’s
not your family’s fault that they haven’t changed. People are people, and they
don’t owe it to you to reverse their lifestyle in favor of your peculiarities.
Nevertheless, when someone throws a specially manufactured gel ball down their
drain to “make it smell lemony fresh,” you lose it. Completely. It’s a waste, a
vanity, a product of disposal-prone culture. But through your rage you can’t
help but notice – that sink smells great. It's a guilty observation that follows you to a laundry room. For those of you who don't know, a laundry room is a magical closet where with the touch of a few buttons your clothes come out clean and dry. No muss and no fuss, ladies and gentlemen. The days of 2-hour designated laundry time, armed with a couple buckets, harsh soap, and roughly a quart of sweat are behind you. The fact that it takes 60 seconds to gather, load, press buttons and walk away just means you have 1 hour and 59 seconds to feel conflicted, elated, wasteful, yet totally free.
Not even the words you say make sense
When living abroad, surrounded by
accents and grammatical phenomena, it’s impossible to not absorb bits and
pieces. If you’re in a fully immersed setting it’s not so much bits and pieces as
a data dump into your brain. Your neurology goes into survival mode and pushes
aside childhood memories to make sure you’re up to speed on the latest local
lingo. I mean this. My first and native language got increasingly difficult to
communicate in the longer I was immersed in my study abroad program in college.
English became less and less an effortless flow of thought and more a carefully
structured grammatical exercise. You’ll spout off phrase structures that have
zero context in real life and most likely throw in a few foreign words because
English doesn’t quite cover it. As a result, those family and friends we
discussed earlier have a harder time reaching you over the gulf of language.
You belong to too many places
If you feel this way – you are
among the lucky few. It’s one thing to arrive in a new place and appreciate a
new culture. That has value and many lessons that will stay with you for the
rest of your life. It’s another matter to live, breathe, and be that new
culture. You arrived with an open heart and an open mind, and in return you
were given the gift of a new home. You can read body language, understand
slang, communicate fluidly with a new set of gestures and sounds, etc. Your
childhood home will always hold a place for you. It molded you, after all. It’s
at the root of your psyche whether you like it or not. But adapting to a new culture
means you can move to a new rhythm. Imagine growing up dancing salsa but
discovering a new joy in sultry blues. You’ve blundered, stumbled, learned to
walk, learned to talk, learned to love in this foreign place. Each experience
was a development, and now it holds a closeness to your heart just like your
homeland does. So what to do? When you’re pulled equally between different parts
of yourself – your childhood home, a self-made home, and the homes far on the
horizon you know are still waiting for you.
You’re gagged by your own experiences
This pairs nicely with item 1)
Everyone is the same, and you are not. But do not be fooled – this results in a different kind of isolation. The first is about coming home to constancy and
boredom. This one is straight-up alienation. For many people back home,
traveling may as well be space exploration. It’s interesting, sure, but not
relevant to their daily life. You’ve just spent months/years with absurd and
crazy things happening to you on a daily basis. You’re a new person, who has
had their own experiences in love, loss, danger, bliss, tranquility, and
hilarity. How are you supposed to wrap up your life in a 5-minute elevator
speech? How can you leave out so much, knowing it isn’t the full picture,
knowing that no matter what you say – your experiences have already been
assumed by the other party. And god forbid you be candid about hardship, about
grief, or actually try and explain the context of a particularly off-the-wall
cultural phenomena. That’s when you see disengagement, judgment, and revulsion.
So instead, you practice a neutral – “it was great. Totally had a blast.” – in
a way that invites as few questions as possible. They don’t really want to
listen to the full answer anyway, and you can’t bear telling half truths that
do a disservice to your memories.
Find a ringer
A ringer, technically, is someone
who looks or appears like something else (ie copy, parallel, equivalent). When
you get home, find your ringer. You don’t need them to also be your best
friend, just someone who can hear your stories and not need a 90 minute debrief
to explain that no, the monkey tied to the handrail was not the most important part of the story. Your ringer has had
similar experiences, similar exposure and understands what it means to remake
themselves. These people will make you sane. Because above all, they listen.
They don’t change the subject. They don’t question the minor details. They hear
your message. What you need when you come home is not to be thrown back into
malls, supermarkets, department stores, paraded as an exotic accessory, or
shunned for your ignorance of the latest music and movies to come out. In all likelihood
you’re going to be spending more money on one beer while chatting with a friend
than you are used to spending on food for a week. What you’ll need is love,
patience, time for all the updates, time for all your updates, some quiet time, some late nights, and some
distractions. You won’t find all of this in one place, so you strategize and
try to predict how you can get what you need from different people.
So that’s you, what about them?
While we can all see that you’re
the one dealing with a lot, it’s important to acknowledge the other side. Not
everyone catches the travel bug, or if they do, some people don’t get the
chance to pursue it in the same way you did. So when you come home from a wild
exotic place to find your former best friend is equally excited about their
promotion at the local community credit union, and they lose it at you when you
scoff at their life goals – yes, you look like a jack***. Because who are you
to criticize how others choose to live their lives? How are your goals more important
than staying at home and raising a family? Bottom line: not everyone needs the
same things you do to be happy. So when you go home and feel alienated from all
you once found familiar – just remember, not everyone has to be excited. They’re living their life they way they want,
and that’s ok, too. You have power over how you communicate, and I bet others
will be more willing to hear your stories if you back off the ego and don’t
slight them for their life choices.
On the other side the spectrum,
they could be super excited to hear about your trip – but don’t know how to ask
the right questions. They might not share your background on what work you were
doing, what daily life was like, etc. So rather than look like an idiot with
their “silly” questions, they remain silent and focus instead on what they have
been doing. When you come home, don’t make the mistake of thinking that
indifference and ignorance are the same thing. You’ve just been through a lot,
but don’t assume everyone is going to magically appear with a tailored listed
of perfect questions. If you find a question offensive, remind yourself that
the individual in question probably doesn’t
mean to be offensive, and try to find a tactful way to answer that doesn’t buy into stereotypes or false generalizations. Of course, if they do mean to be
offensive... get at 'em, Tiger.
