How to Go Back After Being Gone So Long

The language sounds familiar, but you don’t understand the words coming out of their mouths anymore than you understand the cultural norms here. More than a feeling of being unsettled, your confidence has been undermined. Bereft, your sense of fitting in has been dismantled and you are standing on the not-so-foreign soil of insecurity, the shifting sands that make a foray into another culture so unstable.

Laughing, another mom refers to her experience in the small town with a joking comment that sits like a lump of lead in your gut as you watch your son’s soccer game: “I came here 20 years ago and I’m still fitting in.”

So, what’s the point then? Aren’t we all simply trying to connect with one another and have a meaningful contribution? The teenagers in the house are simply looking for a friend – just one will do. It turns out that the amalgamation of reverse culture shock into an entirely new cross cultural one is the most surprising shock after all.

How do you go back, after being gone so long? Just to find out you are back where you started, trying to fit in.

First – you need to accept the facts for what they are – you need to accept reality. You are here now – where you were and what you experienced there no one here can relate to. So just let it simply be a part of who you are without having to talk about it all the time. Another important fact is that you aren’t coming back to anything you remember. Remember that you have been gone for more than a decade, so life has moved on here just as it moved on for you there. And the final key to this reality you are now in is that you need to keep moving – you are here, and you need to be bring all of who you are to this experience and continue moving every day and growing forward.

Then, you also need to accept that you’ve learned a lot. No one can live cross culturally without endless lessons about yourself, how relationships work, how to navigate through the landmine of cultural taboos and snafus – ever-evolving applications of these lessons are endless. If you keep your wits about you, you should have plenty of tools in your toolbox for these new experiences and the lessons coming your way. But you may need to remind yourself of the first step intermittently – you need to get over the initial shock that reverse culture or cross culture shock brings so you can work through all the other steps. You need to accept that the lessons you’ve learned are not the end of your learning.

The next step in how to come back after being gone so long is to be open. You will continue to receive new lessons daily, so you need to be open to receive them. Even though coming back allows you to speak a language you’ve known since birth, there’s much you don’t understand. The danger now is to close up or close off. You will be tempted to react because the truth is, you are human, and sometimes being here, not understanding and not being understood, is just plain lonely. You will be tempted to react from this lonely place and think bad things about the people you don’t understand and who don’t seem to understand you. To think they don’t care about you or to think they don’t care about anything outside the world of their town, their family and community.

But what is one of the most important lessons you learned living overseas, going cross-cultural? You learned not to judge another person until you walked some steps in his/her shoes, until you rubbed shoulders with them, washed dishes together, found water together, laughed and cried together. Sometimes applying this lesson takes imagination, but certainly your experience that has spanned the globe has enlarged your imagination and your heart. You don’t have to wash dishes together or find water together to know that these are people with broader and deeper experience than anything on the surface reveals. Yes, it would be amazing to be allowed into that below-the-surface experience where community is built, but sometimes, in some places, that takes more time than you’ve been given. So, your reality here and now is rising above the temptation to react and learn to live freely and generously with who you are, whether or not you ever get to live below the surface with people in the new culture where you find yourself.

And here’s another important step – take stock of expectations. Remember, expectations bite and sometimes those bites hurt. To minimize the wounding, be aware of your expectations. Do you have realistic expectations for yourself and others? Or, are you dreaming? If you’re dreaming wake up, because it is in reality that you will grow. If you’re not paying attention you may miss the potential and opportunity to optimize and thrive. Don’t under-estimate people just because you don’t understand. Maybe it’s more about the fact that they don’t understand either and they haven’t had the benefit of living cross-culturally and learning all the lessons you’ve learned. They’ve learned different lessons, just as we mentioned before, so don’t forget that there’s always so much more below the surface.

And probably the most important step of all in how to go back after being gone so long is to be humble – take time to be patient with yourself and the people around you. The truth? You may never fit in here. This is the truth that coincides with this step. And the other truth is that you are just passing through – you won’t be here for 20 years and so the aim of “fitting in” will simply send you off trajectory anyway. The aim of having a meaningful contribution and possibly depositing something positive in someone else’s life will most likely build you up and lead you (and someone else) toward a more positive future. So what? You may not cultivate life-time friendships here, but you can learn and contribute in a way that lasts a lifetime. To be humble is to be genuine – to genuinely need to learn from others and recognize how others are reaching out to you as well as for opportunities for you to give back.

In the end, “coming back” or “going home” are dangerous misnomers because they lead to believing lies. These lies convince you that you are going back to some safe place only to find it covered, overgrown in a tangled mess of weeds and thistles too thick to pull out. The truth is you can never come back, you will never go home. Everything is always changing. And while that can be frightening to come to terms with, in the end it is frees you up to find and experience the truth: Home is a seed planted inside us that takes root and whose roots grow down deep establishing who we are, Who’s we are. It’s the rootedness within that doesn’t change.