Hello my peeps,
Another semester has come and gone without me posting. I've been wanting to keep this blog up to provide additional information on Japan, but that hasn't happened yet. I know, sad, isn't it? In this post, I will provide some insight into a returnee's life. Coming home after a long stay in another country is not easy by any means. If you could just ask my mom, she has bore witness to my frustrations and defeats. There is so much that happens when you're back from abroad that you get tossed around by the torrents of life and emotions. As I collect my thoughts on this, I pray that you open your hearts and minds to this, especially if you have friends and family abroad. They will need you to understand this topic upon their return.
As a child, I never moved. Nor had I moved prior to studying in Japan. That concept of leaving one's former house to live in another was foreign to me, which might have magnified my own troubles as being a returnee.
The first thing I realized upon coming home was that things around the community had changed. A new house across the street from mine had been built while I was away. The buildings at my school's art department were now labelled with letters to help guide students to their classrooms. Infants of some of my church friends were no longer immobile and had passed into toddlerhood. I hadn't returned home, but rather, had come to back to a new home. For returnees, there is no more 'normality' for them. We had developed our own 'normality' during our time away, but not only does that no longer exist for us, our previous 'normality' doesn't exist either. Some returnees will react immediately to this, some like me will shovel it away until we can either process it later or no longer bear the confusion it causes. It also takes us a long time to realize the magnitude of which our pre-'abroad' life has changed. Just the other day, while going somewhere with my mom, I discovered that a hotel has been built behind a local gas station. When I asked my mom about it, she told me it had been completed for about a year, meaning its construction and completion coincided with my time abroad. Oh, and the Oscars this year? Those had no particular meaning to me since I hadn't heard of most of the nominated movies since they had been advertised and released while I was gone. This coupled with the fact that most movies take months to years to be released internationally, I had very little chance of even knowing about the nominated movies.
The second thing I noticed was how emotionally unstable, fragile, and confused I was for most of this year. Granted, I had a lot happen over the course of the year. Er...I should break this topic into two parts: the emotional response of being home and the affects of post-'abroad' life on the emotional response.
So, the emotional response to being back at home. As I had started to say, there are strong emotional currents in play, much of which the returnee will not realize until later at the very least. We are grieving the loss of companionship with our friends we made abroad. We are confused by the loss of time at home or even how to refer to our pre-'abroad' home, because now we have two homes in our hearts. There is disconnect between our friends and family due to the time abroad. People who once needed us found others to 'take' our place. It is very strange emotionally to come back home. We are sensitive about how often we begin a story with "When I was abroad..." or "When we were in (insert study abroad country)...". Our stories are no longer inclusive to the listeners due to the experiential gap between us, so we do not always know if we talk too much about our time abroad. We also aren't sure with whom we have shared our tales, either. I have been fortunate to have friends who want to hear about my time abroad, but I have read other accounts of returnees who have been told to quit talking about their time abroad. This all plays into our emotional response and confusion. Think of a new pet that you have brought in your house. They are slow and rigid when moving around, peeking around every corner, freezing at every sound and movement in the environment, and when scared, they quickly run away, desperate to find security. We returnees are like that. We are trying to ease ourselves back into our 'former' life and uncertain what to make of the environment around us. However, we may not have a place we call 'security'. The other day, I tried to catch a scared little kitten in a neighbor's yard. The poor thing ran into the neighbor's glass door six times as it bolted around the yard because it could only see a place of safety, but could not comprehend the existence of the glass door. Returnees can be like that kitten, unable to find a safe place or be able to reach the place we see. We will run into many painful experiences as a result. The people around us cannot easily understand our confusion, nor can they calm us down well because there exists the experiential gap.
On top of the confusion and pain caused by coming home, we still have to live life and deal with things at home. One of the big things I had to deal with upon my return was my paternal grandpa's illness and death. Some of my friends lost family and pets while abroad. One friend's family moved a few months after coming home and myself and another friend had to deal with water pipes breaking shortly after our return. All these little things that complicate life have a larger impact on us because we are also reeling with the overwhelming adjustment of being back at home. We tend to count the 'bad things' that have happened upon our return because all we want to do it readjust to being away our host nation, where we were just studying abroad. We are tired from the travels and packing, running around the last few weeks of our time abroad doing the things we needed to do in order to leave successfully. The last thing we need is a pipe breaking, forcing us to either rip up flooring or walls to fix the problems, moving furniture or decorations around as needed to protect them and to reach the problem. And, we can't just go jump on a train, climb upstairs, or grab the phone to complain to our buddy about what just happened like we did when we were abroad. They are no longer easy to contact because our lives have become separated. Between some of my best buds from my time abroad, I have only Skyped them three...maybe four times. One lives up north from me, while others live in either different country or a different state, meaning there is a time difference between some of us. Our go-to people are no longer there, and in a community that is a commuter society, most of my friends here in the States are not within reasonable commuting range to come to my every beckoning whenever I need to talk something out with someone besides my parents and brother. Sometimes, that which I need about has to do with my family life, not because something terrible is necessarily happening, but the dynamics of being at home have changed and we cannot effectively function around our family anymore. Parents are parents still, telling us what we need to do, which is irritating when you have just spent a year taking care of yourself in a foreign land. Frictions occur between our siblings because they are constantly within our lives, where before we could just tell them goodbye over Skype when we needed to get stuff done. Coming home is not a dry cut between one life and another. Our entire world has been thrown into the fan and shredded into the wind.
The final thing I will talk about is the need to return to our friends and host nation. This need varies between people, since some will have never become attached to their host nation while others were almost immediately at home there. One thing that horrified me from the moment I moved into my dorm in Japan was not being able to return to Japan after returning home. Within the first few months of my Japanese life, I had four or five dreams about either my study abroad family or myself being kicked out Japan and not allowed to come back or going home for a visit only to find that I couldn't get back to Japan for one reason or another. Those dreams were a reflection of just how much love I have for Japan. Many who know me have asked since my return to the States whether I plan on living in Japan ever again. The answer is 'yes, but I don't know when or how I will be able to get back there." This hurts me. I have cried an innumerable amount of times over not being able to go back to Japan yet. I spent several class periods this past spring semester wanting to slap close my notebook, jump on a train and head over to a mall or store that I visited a lot while in Japan, only to realize that I would have to save up money, then buy a plane ticket to Japan, and make hotel reservations before I could go hang out at my usual places. When walking around my campus, I will see people I recognize as friends, only to realize that can't be because those friends do not live here nor go to my school. They were friends I had in Japan and now they are back in their home city, state or land. One of the most frustrating thing about being back at home is that I have a tendency to start making an outing suggestion, only to realize that the place I want to go visit is still in Japan. My life in Japan has somehow overlapped with my life at home and I do not always recognize it immediately.
I hope this is a little bit insightful. I want those who are about to go abroad or are coming back from abroad to know that their frustration and confusion is not abnormal for returnees. It just seems like it when most people around us are not returnees.
Oh, quick note for the soon-to-be or future returnees, school sucks when you come back. The pacing in the US school is unforgiving, making the return home worse. My friends and I have complained to each about how much we don't want to be in school, not because our need to be in school has diminished. Nope, at least for me, I did not have the capacity to care.Wanted to care, but their was no more room in my emotional inn to care about school. So, don't feel bad if, upon your return, can't care about school. We have been there, too...
Until then, later peeps!
