In 2008, I quit my corporate job, sold off everything I owned and moved overseas with my husband Drew. Since then we've traveled around the world, started our careers over as creative types and nurtured our love of sleeping in late. Oh and we had a baby. Cole, our almost 2 year old has been traveling since he was four months old and probably knows more Thai than me (not that he brags).
The Psychology of Coming Home
It will happen to you too. Eventually, despite what everyone says, you do have to go home again. This week, probably many of you are heading home to see family and friends for the holidays. If you travel, you do this after every trip.
The same cliches are true about both: no one will understand “what you do”, no one wants to hear the long version about it, and you’ll feel like you changed but the people back home haven’t. It doesn’t matter if you left for college or to live abroad, it’s the classic fish out of water experience, that we all have at some point.
But when you travel, you don’t have somewhere to return to. After the holidays, college students go back to college, family go back to their jobs, long lost relatives get lost.
Is it possible to be estranged from the entire world? Or is that just the schizophrenic nature of bouncing from one group to the next?
For example: You make friends in Spain, and they don’t understand Americans. They think of Spain first, then Europe, then the world. They see the world through this prism and imagine that Americans are very different– not just culturally and socially, but fundamentally.
You fly across an ocean back home into a new bubble. They see the world as their town, their country, and vaguely the rest of the world. The view is narrower, but the same. They don’t understand how people in the next town think. You’re like an anthropologist in your own backyard. Acutely aware of the strange and unusual behaviors of the natives.
You are a member of two groups with conflicting views, and you have begun to think like both of them. For instance: can I actually think Parisian cheeses and Velveeta are both good? And can I get either group to switch cheese for a day (not likely)?
So what do you do? Do you incorporate the two lives together, building a mesh of new life and old? Or do you blend in and enjoy each groups company on it’s own merits? For me it’s been more of the latter. I’ve been immersed in two different cultures, and I let them stay that way– different. Instead of becoming this whole new person, I’ve just let myself become more diversified. I’m invested in many different areas. And in it’s own way, that somehow feels better.