Living between Countries - On Leaving, Returning and Finding Comfort in Strangeness

“Do you miss your family?” This is a question I hear a lot when I am living abroad and it’s not easy to reply with a simple yes or no. Yes, it is challenging leaving behind your loved ones, especially when moving away for the first time. No, I am not grieving a loss, because I know they are still there, texting with me, calling, telling me about their lives and vice versa. One or two years ago, my mum and I were walking the dog, wandering the vineyards on the outskirts of my small home village in southwestern Germany. “I have already begun to accept that when you visit, you are only a guest in our house,” she said. For a moment, my heart sunk a bit in my chest, but then I understood what she meant. I have left the nest and even though this place will always be my home and my roots, I have moved on. 

I see going abroard as a great privilege. That's not to say it doesn't come with a variety of different challenges, especially when you just finished school: You’re far away from your family, perhaps a different time zone, different language, different culture. In many cases, you have never lived on your own before and now here you are, facing the world alone. I have written this article as part of an application for a student blog. I am going to move to a different country to study and wanted an easy way to make some small money, since I like to write anyway. I didn't get the job, but since I already have the words written down, I decided to publish this post anyway.

It is not my first time leaving my home country to work or study elsewhere. And I am not really leaving it either. I am returning, to depart again. I finished my bachelor two years ago and decided to do a gap year, working in Rwanda, something mostly unrelated to anything I do or have done at university. Why am I doing this? How do I leave my home? How do I return? More specifically, how do I return back to academia, after a two year gap?

Why go abroad?

When I first left home to move to another country my sister asked me, “Don’t you think you are wasting your time?” and to be fair, she voiced my own doubts out loud, which is why her question felt like a gut punch. I wasn’t even leaving to study, I was leaving to become more independent, discover the world, and discover myself. You know, those things people say nowadays and you just roll your eyes. As cheesy as it sounds, though, it was my honest ambition and it worked out well for me. I learned many things I could never find in a book. Shortly after landing, I almost fell into a depression, desperately trying to reverse insignificant decisions I made that appeared sub-optimal at the time, creating problems where there were none. Just a few months later, I managed to successfully navigate myself out of a situation in which I was dumped, jobless and homeless, into a COVID-19 lockdown post-apocalypse, after barely surviving a chaotic multiple-day hiking trip in the middle of nowhere. Try to teach this in a classroom setting.

You may say that I can easily encounter these challenging learning experiences anywhere living on my own, even inside your own country. And I am aware that not everybody has the same opportunities to travel as someone who is lucky enough to have been born in the right place. But there are some experiences you cannot make if you never leave your place of familiarity and it's worth making use of the opportunity if you have it. 

Where my initial travel destinations have taught me independence, crisis management and resilience, my latest adventure has opened my eyes to a completely new set of perspectives. I was already convinced I was an open-minded person when I left the Global North for the first time, even though it wasn't my first move to a new country. I knew East African culture would likely be very different from what I already knew. I only noticed how small minded I had actually still been, when heated debates with friends from a different background challenged many of the core values I grew up with and which I considered a big part of my personality. It is equally fascinating and terrifying to see what power the environment you live in has over you. Only leaving this environment and looking at it from afar, can show you its entirety, with all its flaws and assets.

How do I say Goodbye?

I had just given my parents and my brother a last hug, before walking towards the security gates on my first flight alone. My sister had not been able to come and say goodbye to me at the airport and we had said our farewells already at home. I turned around, one last time, looking at my family that I wouldn’t see for a whole year. My mum was crying and I forced myself not to do the same, as I waved, smiling, and continued walking. Only when I was sitting in my seat on the plane, did I allow the tears to flow. 

From this personal experience, leaving home for the first time was the hardest. You don’t know what’s ahead and people who have always been around you throughout your whole life, disappear behind the security gates. It was easier the second time, because I knew I could rely on myself and ties to the place and people you grew up with are strong. Saying goodbye to another place when returning to your home is significantly more difficult for me and feels like the airport scene every time. For all I know, the second time in the other place might never happen.

Look at your life like writing a book. Your parents, siblings, teachers, and all the other people you grew up with taught you how to write. It is scary staring at a blank page, when you finally start writing your own story, since all the reference material you have was provided by other people. But with every chapter you complete, you add to this reference material, feeling more confident about what you can actually do on your own. Every chapter you finish is a completed part of your life. You return to your home in between chapters, reading your stories and telling friends and family about your adventures, while preparing for the next one. With one story closing, a new one begins, but it also means saying goodbye to the characters from the old chapter. Unless it serves the plot, you will never see them again.

For the longest time, this is how I viewed it: The chapter was written, a check on the bucket list, but the plot didn’t include looping back to it. Being a person, who struggles a lot staying in contact with people she cannot physically meet, makes the parting all the more difficult. Set phrases like “Come back and visit us”, or “Come visit me in my place next time”, feel somewhat empty when your experience has proven, that these things never happen. 

This time, starting my new chapter pursuing a master's degree abroad, I am facing a completely new challenge: Having to say goodbye to my boyfriend and figuring out a long distance relationship while settling into life at university in a new country, is already stressing me out. But I tell myself, that my previous failures in staying in touch, don’t mean I can never learn. And just because you think the plot doesn’t include a loop back to a completed chapter, doesn’t mean it won’t happen. After all, even though you now have a clearer vision of where your story will go, you are still looking at a blank page. You are the author. An author who changes with every experience, every chapter, and every character introduced to the story.

How do I return?

Every homecoming is somehow bittersweet. You are leaving a place where you lived for several months, made friends, made experiences, learned life lessons. It is not just a random weekend trip. This place was your home away from home and became an important part of your life. At the same time you are welcomed by your family with open arms at the airport. I remember returning from my half-year internship during my bachelor studies. My mother brought the dog to the airport and that fluffy thing was going wild and crazy when she saw me exiting the luggage claim area. Nostalgia hits hard when you walk familiar roads, sleep in your childhood room, and eat your parents’ homemade food. 

This time, my homecoming will barely last two weeks and is technically more of a new departure. Therefore, my return comes with several different challenges: Physically moving myself and my stuff to Sweden, transitioning from one foreign culture into another one, and transitioning back into academia, after a two year gap. Am I worried about those challenges? Not really. 

Moving to another European country, for an EU-citizen, is not as difficult as it is for most other people. I need housing, different insurances, registration with the university, as well as to arrange my ID. It’s a bunch of things to do, but it’s really quite straight forward. You make a list of things to be done, when they need to be done, and how they need to be done. My list has three phases: Pre-move preparations, physical move, and post-move administrations. Everything that can be done digitally, as well as all the logistical planning and information gathering, happens in Phase 1. The second phase is mainly just packing, jumping on the train, putting on music and enjoying the ride. And Phase 3 includes all things, for which I need to be there physically, like local registrations and opening of a bank account. It’s really not as difficult, as long as you have your to-do list and all steps planned out. 

Transitioning between cultures is a bit more complex and nothing you can really prepare for. There are a few things you can do before going there: Study up on some background information, like history, politics, traditions, language. What always worked out for me was to jump into it with an open mind and no expectations: be culturally sensitive and observant, and you’ll find your footing as you go. But how is it returning from a solo adventure to a culture that was once so familiar?

Living in different countries ever since I finished high school has not just taught me about different cultures. Especially my most recent experiences in the Global South also opened my eyes to new perspectives on my own upbringing. This can make it difficult, returning to friends and family who haven’t got these same insights. The first time returning from one year working and living abroad, I felt anxious. I feared going back to the old place, interacting with the old people, would also bring out the old me and erase the new one. This was a valid concern. After all, we tend to adapt to our environment. And if it’s still mostly the same as before, won’t I be the same as before too? I did fall back into old habits: Getting stressed about the same old annoyances, panicking over unnecessary things, being triggered by the same old people. It appeared my fears had come true. It was only months later that I actually started to realize the lasting change: I was more resilient against stress, even though it didn’t feel like it. My problem solving had improved and all those tiny problems that made me think I lost my progress were only as apparent, because of the absence of real existential threats I had avoided without even realizing it. 

It is not easy to return to a place and people that haven’t seen what you saw, that haven’t done what you did. In their eyes you are still the same little girl from one year ago. The brat who ticks out over the smallest criticism, the glutton who empties the whole fridge in just a few days. My behavior adapts to the way I am being treated, this is still the case. After all those years away from home, I still turn into that little girl, that brat, that glutton, when I return to my family. But it is not the whole Me anymore. My old self has never vanished. It has expanded and adapts to the environment. 

This brings me to my last question: How do I return to academic studies? To be honest, I think I already answered this question: I adapt to the required environment. As mentioned before, I didn’t go to Uni straight after finishing high school. I did a gap year already before starting my bachelor studies and even ended up choosing a subject that had been my greatest weakness in school. Naturally, I struggled. But not because of the gap year. My behavior adapts to different environments and the school-environment is not completely unfamiliar. Like with my family, my brain already holds a record on how to behave and what to do when I’m studying. This doesn’t vanish, just like that little gluttonous brat is also still there. 

On another note, “gap-year” does not mean a gap in learning. We learn as we encounter problems and try to solve them. There are numerous problems you encounter when being on your own in a foreign country, so you are constantly learning. It’s just a different kind of learning than in academia. You only need to re-adapt into the intentional learning style from your school days.

Back to the Beginning

Back at the beginning of this post, I asked four questions. Let me answer them directly: 

I am leaving my home because there is something that simple studying at school or university cannot give me. When I go to try and find that something, my home is never gone. Even though I am not physically there it will always be the place where I grew up and learned how to write and they will always be the people who know the original little me and listen to her stories, as she reads them the chapters she has written. I don’t return as an altered version of that little me. I have expanded around her and return with a new set of skills and insights at my disposal that I can use if the environment requires it. If the environment requires me to study academically, I will adapt accordingly. And if the environment requires me to strip off this armor and lay down all of those tools and just be the gluttonous little brat, then this is what I will be. As the story of my life progresses, more chapters will be added to the book. But no chapter, no place, no character will ever be erased once they have been introduced to the plot.