England Take II

Well after a marathon day of travel leaving Pittsburgh at 7am on New Years day for Ambler, New York, Brussels, and Birmingham, I made it safely back to this crazy island that we call home for now. As I drifted in and out of consciousness during my trip back, I thought about how different this trip was than our first trip here together 4.5 months ago. In many ways this trip was harder, since in August we at least had Christmas to look forward to and the idea of living in another country had quite a bit of mystery, excitement, and wonder about it. There is still some of that excitement, though being with family and friends in the States really reminded us of what we are stepping away from for this adventure.

Being home was wonderful, strange, and frightening for me in unexpected ways. It was glorious to eat American pizza, burgers, and fast-food, to have friendly and talkative cashiers and waiters, and of course, to spend time with the people that we love. But through all of this I kept feeling like things were different, like America and those we knew best had changed. I see now that home didn’t really change, I did. My whole bank of recent experiences and “England existence” seemed discordant with the life of friends and family that I embraced while home.

As I often do when I feel things and have no idea what’s going on, I talked to Lauren who noted that it seemed like I had real culture shock. A seasoned world-travel, Lauren talked about the strangeness of coming home after her summers in Mexico and traveling the Pacific. It’s hard to recognize and understand the changes that happen when you are immersed in another world, and I found answering the common questions “how is England?” obviously overwhelming and difficult to communicate. “Who are you?” is more like the question I would have to get through to answer the first one well.

What is perhaps hardest for me in my cultural schizophrenia is the timidity that I feel here and felt even in the States. I have always been a pretty confident person socially, but it seems that confidence is dependent on being at ease in the culture I am operating in. Here we are still very aware of being “the Americans”, the outsiders, and are somewhat guarded in social settings. What was frightening for me was that when we came home to everything we remember and love, I still felt the timidity of an outsider. If I can’t feel ‘myself’ in the places I was born, grew up, worked, when will I get that confidence back for good?

This is complex process and something that I’m sure anyone who lives in another culture wrestles with at some point. To be fair, a crazy 2 weeks back in the States trying to see everyone we could is probably not enough for me to adjust and ‘come back’ to my confident old, grin-flashin’, sarcastic-line-slinging self. I hope that with more time in both places, I will learn to feel comfortable and ‘myself’ again. I suppose this experience is making me look at myself in new ways and forcing questions that would never have been asked otherwise. It’s one of the many things we are learning through this adventure, but certainly not an easy part of our experience abroad.

-Nick