#repat

brain:

brain: “You wanna say the same stuff over and over again just because you think it’s funny?

When I moved away (twice), people would make comments that I admit, at the time, boosted me a little. “Wow, you’re so brave to move to a country where you barely know anyone, all by yourself.” That didn’t scare me, that excited me. It just pumped me up.

There were days and nights where I cried. Hard. In Prague, during that awkward phase where the company-paid temporary apartment was gone but my shipment from the US hadn’t arrived yet, and my local paychecks hadn’t started coming in, there was a solid month where I slept in my new but empty apartment on the cold hard floor, using a tablecloth that a previous tenant had left behind as a blanket. (Yes, I washed it, sickos.)  It was that phase of “I don’t want to buy anything because I there are several blankets in my container,” and also, “I have 300 Czech crowns left in my bank account, so I should probably use them for food.”  That was a shitty month.

In Rio, there was a period at the beginning when, not only did cariocas make plans with me and not show up (I later learned and embraced that this is just part of the local culture), but I was also without my shipment and everything that could possibly go wrong with an apartment did. One night after work, when my phone wasn’t charged and I was sleeping on a single mattress on the floor (upgrade since Prague though, hey-oh!) with a pile of my own clothes as a pillow, my walls started to leak water and my electricity stopped working. There had been a storm that day and I thought it was the whole building, until I opened my door and saw under the other apartment doors that everyone else was fine. 

Those were hard times, man. I had those moments of, “Why did I come here?” and wanting to give up and go home. But they were fleeting blips on the timeline of two amazing experiences. Experiences that today, I look back on with pure fondness - even those bad moments, because I smile when I realize I got through them.

But coming back...

Coming back should have been easy, right? Back to my old house, to my family, to my old friends, to my old colleagues, to my same job. How could that be hard? Well, something I knew on a superficial level but never allowed to sink in was that life didn’t stop while I was gone.

My old lunch crew had bonded for four years, and all of them either got married, had kids, had multiple kids, or left the company. I had expected not to be up to speed on every aspect of their lives; I hadn’t expected not to be invited anymore.

My best friend and I skyped at least weekly the whole time I was gone. I had expected that we would both be busier now; I hadn’t expected that I would be able to count on one hand the number of times I saw her in person over 5 months.

I had expected to feel different for having lived abroad; I hadn’t expected to feel like a ghost.

This article, and others like it, explain that feeling pretty well. 

I find that initiating change is really helping me through it. Discovering what actually matters to me, and I’m taking steps toward that now. I realized that I have way too much stuff and I’ve decided to go minimalist, for one. Not one of those that you see on documentaries whose house is just a room and a single chair, but in the sense that I want everything in my home to have a purpose, even if that purpose is just making me happy.

For example, when I went to Costa Rica for work, I was on my own for a whole weekend. I decided to take a city bus to this artsy town about an hour outside of San José, and I got there just by asking around and relying on the kindness of locals (note: Ticos are VERY kind.)  When I arrived, I found a shop that had gorgeous wood carvings, decorations, from these incredible woods that I’d never seen before. One was purple - naturally purple! - and I found a gorgeous bowl. The kind you’d set on your coffee table. And I try to keep my souvenirs to a minimum, but I just knew that bowl had to go home with me. I went on to have an amazing day - I met a taxi driver at a little bar who offered to take me on a scenic drive and then back to the bus station for a really low price, just because he wanted to practice his English and loved to show off his country. He stopped along the way for me to take pictures, to see a beautiful church, to see a little waterfall. We didn’t keep in touch but he was just a kind local that I’ll always remember. So when I see that bowl, I think of him, of that day, of that feeling of navigating a new country all alone, and the satisfaction I felt when I plopped into bed at the end of that day. I’m not getting rid of that bowl.

But the crappy lavender-scented candle that I got as a grab bag gift at some party I hadn’t wanted to go to anyway? The one I keep holding on to despite the fact that I’m not really a candle person, just because “it’s good and I shouldn’t throw it away”? That needs to go.

I always dreamed of having blue walls. I’m going to paint my walls blue. 

And damnit, I’m going to make myself happy, because nobody else is going to. (No offense to my husband. Of course he makes me happy. Swoon swoon, heart heart.)

Anyway, this got kind of random, but my main point was this: being a “repat” is harder than being an expat ever was.