Growing Pains & The Comedown of Moving Back Home
I wrote a similar piece for my university travel blog titled the exchange comedown. But that piece was really a guide to navigating reintegration , how to handle coming back to normality at ‘home’ after a transformative year living abroad where you experienced so much.
It seems that many Substack articles are increasingly leaning toward a self-help style. While these pieces are undoubtedly valuable within their own domain, there is a loss of vulnerability, of sharing personal experiences, which is what I feel most ignited by in good writing. Being able to cultivate some sort of understanding of a person’s inner world: this is art.
Rather than watering down the experience and jumping straight to the solution. In alchemising the emotions too quickly, you lose the raw intensity of the internal experience. The intensity that births both the beauty and the brutality in art. The most impactful art and writing comes from the depths of truth, when vulnerability, authenticity, and real experience are allowed to speak freely.
In this article I would like to lean into sharing my internal experience rather than offer advice or self help.
When you first come back from a prolonged period of being away from ‘home’ you are filled with contradictions. On one side of the coin there is excitement , anticipation and joy of being reunited with those you haven’t seen in so long. Comfort in the familiar, the same places and faces you know very well. On the other side of the same coin, there can be an uncomfortable sense of not knowing where you belong, feeling disconnected from the place you once called home, no longer fitting in here, yet having outgrown the place you left behind.
For me coming back home has been an experience of intensity. Life feels surreal and I feel like an alien. While all my surroundings feel familiar, I am not the same person that I was when I left, when I was last living this version of reality.
There is a disconnect to my ‘new’ life. A disconnect from the old self who once slept in this bed. I walk the same streets I’ve known all my life, yet it feels like I’ve woken from a year-long dream, or emerged from a coma spent in an alternate reality. Meanwhile, everyone else has continued along this familiar path, unchanged, as if nothing ever paused. I don’t identify with this place anymore. My perception of home has changed. Part of me feels untethered. Split between timelines: suffocated by old memories, but guilty for not appreciating all that I am blessed with here. Grieving the life I have just lived, yet feeling hopeful about creating a new chapter. Contradictions plague my mind at all moments, yet I say nothing at all. There is a comfort in the notion that all this intensity I feel is surely a sign of growth, that this discomfort can simply be defined as growing pains.
In this period of ‘homecoming’. Home itself has become a concept I have a new relationship with. Home is a construct associated with comfort and familiarity. For some home is simply about material possessions, the things that ground them, the earthly items that bring a sense of safety. Others resonate with home being in the people who surround them, their loved ones. What does home mean to me? It’s a place where I feel I belong. Home is intrinsically linked to belonging. It’s part of identity. It’s in belief that I don’t just hold an affinity to this place, me and this place have become one and the same. I have come from here, its effect on me runs so deeply that it’s woven into the very fabric of who I am. We are now the same. I think the fierceness of your affinity to ‘home’ is tied to how much you identify with where you’re from, how much it reflects the core of who you are. So much so, you defend it like it’s a part of you because it is. It defines you,in the ways you carry it inside. The depth of this identity is hard to measure, but I do feel the longer you are away, or the more you begin to identify with somewhere else this bond begins to shift. For some, it’s flattened. For others, it’s strengthened. Those like me who feel neither a full sense of belonging in their hometown, nor in the place they moved back from may begin to feel a quiet sensation of mental displacement, a subtle detachment from the reality they’re living in.
On Translating this internal experience. One thing that can be hard is explaining is how you’re feeling, I’m naturally bad at this. But there is an added layer when you just move back home, because you are now changed. The way you feel about so much is probably different and hard to define simply.
I experience life differently every day. Some days, I’m excited about the creation of my new life: full of possibility and momentum. But the next day, I feel lost or stuck in the past, overwhelmed by everything I need to do, everywhere I think I need to be, and all the versions of life I could live. It’s a familiar feeling after long-term travel. You’ve now seen parts of the world that you can’t un-see or un-experience. It can be haunting. Suddenly, you can no longer relate to the place you came from in the same way, because your eyes have been opened to a broader, more complex sense of possibility. And with that comes a kind of paralysis. A fear of choosing the wrong path among so many. A pressure to build a future that somehow honours all you’ve seen, all you’ve become.
It reminds me of Sylvia Plath’s fig tree metaphor:
“I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
That’s what it feels like, knowing so much is possible, but feeling weighed down by the fear of what choosing one life might mean for all the others you’re leaving behind.
I try my best to stay grateful and present. To bring everything I loved about being away into my reality at home. I go to yoga classes, I take a daily walk, I read, I write, and I try to maintain the connections I created while I was away. I know it’s a waste to live in the mind or worse, in the past. I can control the controllables, and create the situation I want to experience. I can continue to grow and build an inner world of beauty, one that will naturally extend into my external reality.
I am kind to myself. I do what I say I will do. The art of trusting my own word has brought me strength especially when I’m feeling particularly lost or like I don’t belong. I’ve learned I can rely on myself, and myself alone. This belief carries me through this period of uncertainty. With self-trust as an anchor, I can release the need to control and instead, lean into trust. When defining trust, I don’t mean the kind that comes hand-in-hand with familiarity or knowing. I mean the kind of trust that exists despite uncertainty, the trust that holds, even when you don’t know how you’ll get through something, or how things will unfold. It’s the willingness to let go of the need to control, and instead allow space for detachment. While control may offer a false sense of comfort, trust brings real calmness.
I believe in sudden, positive shifts and my life is a testament to that. In the past I’ve seen things work out better than I could have imagined, each of those instances stemming from trust and letting go of control. Things can change for me at any time. I surrender any doubts that it won’t work out for me.
Life is vibrant where you make it so. I know there is so much more life to be lived. This period ,while unsettling, is absolutely necessary for planting the seeds of my becoming. A reminder for myself and any others experiencing a comedown of shifting realities: the grass is greener where you water it. Drop the resistance and embrace the joy around you.
Above all , I am deeply grateful to even go through this internal experience as it is testament to the privilege I have lived. It’s what makes coming home so hard. And I’m profoundly grateful for my home, the people around me, and all the privilege I live in.
I hope this has resonated with someone. Regardless, I’ve appreciated the brain dump, the practice of articulating how I’m feeling, and doing my part to share personal experience here on Substack. More anthropological articles coming soon :0
