No one ever talks about it. How was I supposed to know it was happening to me? I’ve always felt out of place and alone. But there’s something different about this. This is crushing; nearly debilitating. This makes me sit at my computer even now; gazing into nothingness while my fingers rest still on the keys. This is Reverse Culture Shock.
I had never heard of Reverse Culture Shock until two weeks ago when my mom gave me a Lonely Planet travel book about volunteering internationally. While casually flipping through the book hoping to see amazing photos of exotic destinations, I came upon a chapter about this very serious, very common and yet very hush-hush condition. What I read changed everything.
One year ago, I hit a wall. I had been travelling internationally for two years; globe-trotting with a carefree passion, meeting foreign people in intoxicating lands, discovering new ways of life, learning about cultures I had read about as a girl in National Geographic and volunteering as a marine conservationist. I was living. I was alive. But eventually I became tired. I was tired of sleeping on the couches of strangers; tired of saying goodbye to people I had come to love so deeply in such a short amount of time. I was tired of being so alone, but always surrounded by people. So I came home to Bellingham. And like with any honeymoon phase, I was blissfully in love with life and with being home. But then time went by and I realized, although I ignored it, that I was struggling to connect with the people I knew here. How do you convey the wonders of Italian history or the harrowing sorrow of seeing Libyan refugees on derelict rafts? How do you put into words the paralyzing horror of standing at the Cove watching the ocean turn red with dolphin blood? You don’t. You can’t. You keep it inside and you hide the fact that you hear dolphins crying every second of every day. You become addicted to sleeping pills to keep the nightmares at bay. And you feel so very alone, all the time. Over the past year, I’ve hidden the crushing, life-sucking feelings that are happening inside me; I’ve hidden the tears and sorrow because how do you make anyone understand that? Everything in my life now is so frustratingly unfamiliar, even though it’s almost identical to the life I had in Bellingham before I ever went overseas. Yet now I forget which side of the road I’m meant to drive on. I forget which currency is in my wallet. I forget if I’m supposed to greet someone with a handshake, a hug, a kiss on the cheek or a bow. Things that used to be so easy, so familiar, are now monumental mountains that shadow my life.
Reverse Culture Shock is very real and all the research I’ve
done shows that it’s more devastating than Culture Shock because you come home
to a place you loved, to the people you loved, and you realize that everything
has changed. You’ve changed. My time overseas has reprogrammed my entire being;
my soul was awakened by the experiences I’ve had and it’s now impossible to be
satisfied with by a bi-weekly paycheck, a sports-shifting Subaru and an
apartment overlooking downtown. My tolerance for mindless submission to the
American Dream is now non-existent. This year being home has been the hardest
of my life, and that’s saying something! But knowing – truly knowing – that there’s
a wide, magical world out there waiting to reveal its exciting secrets and yet
I’m trapped here, has been enough to drive me mad. The only thing that keeps me
going is the hope that one day I’ll be released back into the wild. I have to
hang on to that hope.
Jumping in Syracuse, Italy on the Isle of Sicily
Soaring above Amsterdam
Watching the Cove on the last day of the 2010-2011 dolphin slaughter season