Expectations on Returning to Seattle
You will quickly have to fall back into ‘real life’ as you’ve only allotted a one-week interim between returning home and the start of winter quarter. It won’t be easy to return to a grey and rainy Seattle winter, your weeks packed with classes, work, assignments, and obligations. Unfortunately for you the norm the past six months has been sunny days wandering Sydney and a whole semester work-free. The life awaiting you in the States will be quite the shock, but you will adjust quickly as it is your ‘real life.’
The familiarity of your home campus and the office you’ve worked at forever will have a calming effect. This will be helpful in the midst of chaos that will welcome you; people will want to catch up, as you’ve been gone for a while. This will help with the transition back, as you’ll get to tell stories and reminisce over pictures. You’ll miss Australia—who wouldn’t miss such a magical place? But you’ll have constant contact with friends ‘down there.’ They’ll make plans to come visit and you’ll make plans to return.
It will be a bit strange to be back in the life you’ve been living for twenty years, but you’ve been doing it your whole life. Sure, you had a nice break from driving every day, a typical exercise schedule, and work. But isn’t that all it was—a nice, wonderful, break from ‘real life’?
Realities of Returning to Seattle
The one-week interim you allotted won’t be nearly enough; in fact, your entire first month will be quite a shock. This month also happens to be January, one of the coldest and darkest months in Seattle. This will be quite a change after leaving an Australian summer. You’ll constantly feel tired, due to lack of sun and light you’ve grown accustomed to. All the rain and clouds will confuse and upset you despite the fact it’s what you’ve grown up in.
The familiarity of campus, work, and ‘home’ will bore you more than offer comfort. Friends and family will be happy and excited you’ve returned, but not as keen to listen to all the endless stories you have to tell. You’ll learn to answer the question “how was your trip” in one of two words; “amazing” or “great.” These words aren’t a lies, but they aren’t the whole truth either. You’ll have many more pictures and crazy stories than most will want to hear.
Often if you ramble on, people’s eyes will begin to glaze over, which isn’t necessarily intentional, just a product of not being able to understand. Friends and family won’t really view your time away as ‘real life,’ for it is so far removed from home that they just won’t understand. This isn’t a bad thing, they’ll spend lots of time catching you up on what you’ve missed while away, catching you up on ‘real life.’
Eventually you’ll find time to look over pictures and daydream about the past, wondering if any of it still matters. You had a nice break abroad, but is that all it was meant to be, a dream? The more and more time that passes the further from reality your memories seem to be. Yet just when you’re beginning to question if it all really happened you’ll get a belated Christmas card in the mail from an old housemate detailing adventures you weren’t sure mattered anymore. Then a few days later you’ll get an email from a Uni friend asking how ‘life in America’ is and reminding you of all the Australian shows you shared a liking for.
These little reminders won’t seem significant until a few more months go by and soon you’ve been ‘back’ for almost as long as you were gone. Your friends abroad are still keeping in contact, and you’ve just begun to feel normal in your ‘real life’ again. Within this normalcy, however, will be a hidden layer of something just a bit disconnected: six months you spent outside of what most consider your ‘real life.’ Sure, you took a ‘break’ from a life you’d been living for all twenty years of your existence, but you weren’t absent from the world for half a year. You were living a very different, yet very ‘real life’ somewhere else, so why is it so hard to connect the two?
The process will be slow, unsatisfying at times, and never ending, but eventually all the pieces will mix together to form a new reality. If you choose to continue exploring the world, slowly ‘real life’ will become a combination of your former ‘home’ and all the little surrogate homes you form in new places. It will be both a blessing and a curse to have so many friends, families, and experiences around the globe. You’ll never completely know what or where ‘real life’ begins and ends. However, once you let go of trying to find it you’ll find this isn’t a bad thing.
Public Health student who loves learning about anything and everything especially while drinking coffee.
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