Coming back home after extended time abroad is like putting on clothes that used to fit perfectly but now feel strange against your skin. Everyone has moved on with their lives, as they should have, which creates this odd segregation where I feel simultaneously like an insider and outsider.
It wasn't that home has changed dramatically; it was that I have changed dramatically, and returning meant figuring out how the new me fit into the old spaces.
Cause the thing about living in-between worlds is that you don't just visit other places – you become someone who belongs to multiple places and no single place completely. You develop a kind of cultural multilingualism, an ability to code-switch between different versions of yourself depending on where you are and who you're with.
This isn't being fake or a loss; it's expansion. I didn't lose my roots – I learned to grow new ones. I didn't abandon who I was – I discovered who else I could become. The experience taught me that identity isn't fixed, that home can be both a place and a practice, that you can love where you're from while also loving who you become when you leave.
Foreign spaces change you in ways you can't predict and you won't realize until you're looking back from the other side. It's uncomfortable and beautiful and lonely and connecting all at once. It's worth every moment of uncertainty, every pang of homesickness, every awkward cultural misunderstanding.
In the end, you don't just gain experience of other places – you gain experience of yourself, in all your adaptable, resilient, endlessly surprising humanity.
And that's a gift you carry everywhere you go, whether you're in a foreign country or back home, whether you're with old friends who knew you before or new friends who know you now. You become someone who understands that the world is both smaller and larger than you ever imagined, and that there's room in one life for many different ways of being human.
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