On Reintegration and "Home"

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.