CIEE sent me a folder about reverse
culture shock, along with a t-shirt and a lunchbox. (A lunchbox?
Really? How odd.) After all this, it seems ridiculous to get a
t-shirt, as if that meant anything about my year abroad. It's not
like marching band shirts, which you wear for solidarity, or the
shirts I bought in France, which have memories associated with them.
So it just seemed like a rather strange afterthought. But anyway, I
read the paper on reverse culture shock, since the pattern about
culture shock in the host country had been more personally accurate
than I would have expected.
And so far, I have
experienced none of it. Perhaps this is because I saw my family 3
weeks before coming home, and thus had a gradual and unusual reunion
with my former life. Perhaps it is because I thought about it so
often, and realized in advance that I was probably idealizing home
and should expect disappointment. For whatever reason, coming home
was just plain coming home. Everything feels routine and I fell into
all the same habits I had before that I had lost this year: eating
whatever, whenever, instead of 3 big meals a day, going to bed at 2
with no one scolding me, sleeping in my hammock, taking the car to
meet up with friends when I want to, drinking delicious American milk
(not UHT), and all the other freedoms I used to have. I have changed,
but my relationships with my friends have also fallen back into place
seamlessly and effortlessly, as the parts of me that have changed are
not parts of me that would show up at home. I am better at being
assertive, being brave in another language, I have accepted the
culture of my region and my high school and all that in France, and
yet at home I fall back into the culture I grew up in... so why would
I be any different? Perhaps the only legitimate feeling I could have
of “They don't understand me!” would be resentment that no one
can witness how much I have changed, and yet that seems a petty
thought, and I already knew and accepted before coming back that no
one will understand what I lived through. I don't need that
affirmation.
So life goes on,
and I guess to all appearances it hasn't changed. But now I have two
homes – a year is a long time and I don't feel like I'm
over-dramatizing by saying this. I belong in France just as much as I
do here. My experiences in college will be viewed through two lenses:
a Silicon Valley kid, with all the inner voices and experiences of my
family and friends, and a girl from the Vendée, with other views
from my host family and friends.
It is a terrible
and wonderful thing to have two homes. It means that no matter where
I am, I will be homesick for somewhere else. I will always be
comparing, and blaming the things I don't like on being in the wrong
place. I'll never (for the rest of my life) be in a position of not
missing anyone.
When I'm at home, I
tend to believe that wanderlust is natural and right, one of the
highest, most enlightened callings one can have in life. I have this
vision that I'll spend my life roaming from country to country, with
a network of friends and family across the globe, and enough life
experiences to write a Game of Thrones -sized book about. Some of my
counselors from French camp have been like that, and I guess they've
inspired me. And yet when I'm abroad I wonder if man's greatest
purpose is instead nurturing our roots, staying with the family and
friends we love, in a culture that understands us so much more
perfectly. Sometimes the whole “going abroad to learn and change”
thing seems silly and irrelevant. But then I come home again, and
decide that going to somewhere in Scandinavia or Francophone Africa
would be the next greatest adventure ever, and I'm already restless.
One can debate the merits of traveling or of staying home, but in the
end maybe I just don't have a choice. I'm driven by my wanderlust to
do things that I can't really regret, because I come out a different
person at the end. So if in two years' time I'm writing about trying
to fit in in Sweden, cursing the fact that I didn't learn my lesson
during my stay in France, you can all remind me that I just don't
have a choice.
