When you come home after living abroad for a while things
are really strange. Your friends, who you’ve kept in touch with over Facebook,
aren’t the same people anymore. They’ve grown. Sometimes they have gotten
sadder. Their houses have changed and they want to celebrate their new
curtains. You think of things in terms of how much things cost and how many
times you could have paid rent with those curtains.
You know that you’ve changed. They’ve expected you to change.
They’ve expected you not to know who the contestants on Survivor are this year. They haven’t expected you to be different. They haven’t expected you to not like watching TV anymore.
Wherever you were, you were free. You didn’t have to hide
your reaction to how weak Starbucks coffee tastes now. You didn’t have to hide
your outrage about how much fresh fruit and vegetables cost. You were
celebrated for your high standards of restaurants, instead of getting the eye
roll from your friends that your old favourite place no longer holds a candle to
your tongue’s new power. That $23 for lunch is a ridiculous concept that would
feed a family for a week. You order tea instead and feel like you are insulting
them.
You don’t feel free. You feel trapped. You feel like you
need to have answers about what you’re going to “do” with your life now that you’re
back and “settling down”.
That’s the worst part about being back. The comparison. The
show. The fact that people feel like they have to tell you things about their
life to make themselves feel better. The game of “look, I’m happy too”. I don’t
mean people who share their lives, their experiences. I mean the ones who
really feel so insecure about themselves that they tell you about their great
mortgage rate and how they “would” travel but they would prefer to invest in
themselves where they can see the
money instead.
People don’t understand that buying things doesn’t make you
happy. They don’t know what its like to live with nothing. They don’t
understand what it’s like not to have a plan from one day to the next.
They expect you to “settle in” and get a routine and a “real
job” because that is what people do.
But you can’t.
Because you know the secret to life.
The worst thing about coming home is that you know the
secret to life and you can’t tell anyone. You can’t tell them because it would
rip open their world from one side to the other and expose all the secrets that
they swallow when they sleep.
