I’ve discovered that the hardest part of travelling abroad is actually learning how to live at home again.
This article I found on a blog called Under the African Skies sums it up very nicely: https://london2cape.com/adventure-travel/the-hardest-part-of-travelling/
After coming home again from travelling, everything is different inside and everything at home is the same. More than just appearances and activities, family members and friends still have the same outlook on life, they still perceive the world in the same way. You on the other hand have grown in ways you never considered and you see through new lenses. I think of perception as a mystical pair of glasses. Every time I experience something new, I add a new lens in front of the previous lens. So you can never really start over or totally change perspectives, you evolve your own perception by adding lenses–each a different color, pattern, and shape–which creates the unique kaleidoscope of a way you see the world. And when I came home from France, my room, my family, my community was all the same as it was, but my entire perception of it was different.
It’s not such a terrible thing because with new sight I interpreted old things in new ways and found that I have a higher tolerance and acceptance for alternative perspectives. Diversity in general has become a really exciting concept for me now. I wouldn’t say I was narrow minded before, but I tended to think that different perspectives were great but could become points of anxiety and conflict. And by being the outsider in a new place for an extended period of time, being different becomes less of a bad thing and becomes more of an opportunity–to share, to collaborate, and to learn.
The struggle with this new perspective is that the people you know still view you in the same way. I felt that I had undergone a metamorphosis, I had seen and experienced so much that I could never consider myself the same person, yet everyone on the home front saw me as my pre-departure self. It makes homecoming terribly anticlimactic. And it’s hard to describe this feeling of being new to the people from home because you start to sound like a pompous wanna-be philosopher. Ultimately, I got frustrated and stopped trying to explain how I felt. Then, after some time, my trip became less and less interesting for my family to ask about, and I fell back into my old rhythm and habits. Now I’m sitting here wondering if I even changed at all. Sometimes I even forget I went in the first place. I wonder all the time if it was even worth it because my experiences don’t seem to have changed anything at all. Except for me.
The blog post I mentioned before says that this frustration is the Travel Bug. The blogger writes, “They call it the travel bug, but really it’s the effort to return to a place where you are surrounded by people who speak the same language as you. Not English or Spanish or Mandarin or Portuguese, but that language where others know what it’s like to leave, change, grow, experience, learn, then go home again and feel more lost in your hometown then you did in the most foreign place you visited.”
I’m inclined to agree. Now I feel that the only way to make those abroad experiences meaningful and lasting is to continue having them. I feel like passed through a door that closed behind me. I simply can’t go back to the way I saw the world before because there are too many interesting and beautiful lenses out there to find and don for that to be possible.
lifesansflan 