To Go Home

A couple of months ago someone posted an article on Facebook about whether one could ever go home again after being an expat and it's something I've been thinking about since, especially as I've been fielding a lot of questions from work lately about whether I want to stay in the region or go back to the US.

 

When you live abroad, whether it's for one year or ten, life moves on without you at home. You miss weddings and birthdays and births and other big life events. You miss the phone call from your best friend that she got engaged because of the time difference. You miss the impromptu calls from friends to chat about life or love or work. And while your friends might think of you fondly and miss you occasionally, they generally fill the gap you left in their social group and move on without you. And as time goes on, the calls and the texts and the emails lessen.

 

And sad as that might sound, my life has also moved on. In 2014 alone I visited 16 countries. Most of my American friends will never visit that many countries in their entire lives and, as the gap between our experiences and lives widen, it becomes harder to find things in common. I learned this at a very young age when I first started traveling - after returning home from a trip, I wanted to tell my friends all about every cool experience, only to find that many of them were immediately bored or were just jealous of my trips (and thought I was bragging). So when people ask about a trip after I return, I generally say something generic like "Oh, it was great!" or "I had a lot of fun but it was so cold!" The people who really want to know more (whether because they care about me or because they're genuinely interested in traveling or just because they're inquisitive people) will generally ask enough follow up questions to get me talking.

 

Most of my funny stories start with phrases like "So, this one time when I was camping in Uganda and surrounded by wildebeests and hippos..." or involve some story about my trials and tribulations of using a squatter toilet (in fact, if I ever wrote a book, I'm pretty sure the title would be something like "Ass Hoses and Squatter Toilets: One Girl's Adventures in Learning to Squat in the World's Shittiest Toilets"). Those stories tend not to be received so well in the US (except by my closest friends). And when I only traveled once or twice a year, it wasn't a big deal to leave those stories out of my dialogue. But now, after traveling this much, how do I go home and be myself and yet leave out such huge pieces of my life and experiences?

 

I imagine it's also hard adjusting back into American culture after living in a foreign culture. I've already talked about how sometimes I get offended on behalf of Arabs when I hear Americans say something ignorant, and I know it's going to be so much worse if I were to return home. Aside from the comments about terrorists and subservient women, there's plenty of people who have said/will say "Ugh, Oman?!?! Where the hell is that and why on earth would you want to go there?!? Did you have to ride a camel to work?"

 

And finally, living abroad makes you miss and appreciate America in ways that I took for granted when I lived there. I miss Target and Wal-Mart and Home Depot and other one-stop shops. I miss craft beer and Cajun food and southern BBQ. I miss real Diet Coke from a fountain. I miss Americans' sense of independence and pride and bullheadedness and belligerence and all the other adjectives that describe our upstart nation, both the positive and the negative. And I know that if I move back I'll just be frustrated by all these things that I miss  (well, not Diet Coke - I'd never be frustrated by Diet Coke) and appalled at how insular and ignorant many Americans are of the outside world.

 

So no, I don't think repatriating back to the US is going to happen anytime soon. And as for going home? Well, I'm already there. Because as any nomad will tell you, home isn't a single place. It's where your friends are, where you put down roots (even for just a year), where your pets are (minus my happily retired dog who has permanently abandoned me for my parents), where the bed is that you long to return to after a few hard weeks on the road, where your local pub is, where the waiter at your favorite restaurant knows your name...

(Oh, and here's a really poignant blog post about this very same topic.)

 

And while it feels like I'm channeling my 20-year old self, I'm going to leave you with some appropriate some lyrics from an old favorite band:

 

I met a girl who kept tattoos
For homes that she had loved
If I were her I'd paint my body
'Til all my skin was gone