{"id":748,"date":"2016-06-03T12:41:26","date_gmt":"2016-06-03T19:41:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/chidint\/journal\/?p=748"},"modified":"2019-03-05T20:33:10","modified_gmt":"2019-03-06T04:33:10","slug":"connecting-a-dream-to-real-life-expectations-and-realities-upon-returning-to-the-u-s","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/chidint\/journal\/2016\/06\/connecting-a-dream-to-real-life-expectations-and-realities-upon-returning-to-the-u-s\/","title":{"rendered":"Connecting a Dream to Real Life: Expectations and Realities Upon Returning to the U.S."},"content":{"rendered":"

Expectations on Returning to Seattle<\/h4>\n

\"Doodle<\/a>You will quickly have to fall back into \u2018real life\u2019 as you\u2019ve only allotted a one-week interim between returning home and the start of winter quarter. It won\u2019t 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 \u2018real life.\u2019<\/p>\n

The familiarity of your home campus and the office you\u2019ve 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\u2019ve been gone for a while. This will help with the transition back, as you\u2019ll get to tell stories and reminisce over pictures. You\u2019ll miss Australia\u2014who wouldn\u2019t miss such a magical place? But you\u2019ll have constant contact with friends \u2018down there.\u2019 They\u2019ll make plans to come visit and you\u2019ll make plans to return.<\/p>\n

It will be a bit strange to be back in the life you\u2019ve been living for twenty years, but you\u2019ve been doing it your whole life. Sure, you had a nice break from driving every day, a typical exercise schedule, and work. But isn\u2019t that all it was\u2014a nice, wonderful, break from \u2018real life\u2019?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Realities of Returning to Seattle<\/h4>\n

\"Doodle<\/a>The one-week interim you allotted won\u2019t 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\u2019ll constantly feel tired, due to lack of sun and light you\u2019ve grown accustomed to. All the rain and clouds will confuse and upset you despite the fact it\u2019s what you\u2019ve grown up in.<\/p>\n

The familiarity of campus, work, and \u2018home\u2019 will bore you more than offer comfort. Friends and family will be happy and excited you\u2019ve returned, but not as keen to listen to all the endless stories you have to tell. You\u2019ll learn to answer the question \u201chow was your trip\u201d in one of two words; \u201camazing\u201d or \u201cgreat.\u201d These words aren\u2019t a lies, but they aren\u2019t the whole truth either. You\u2019ll have many more pictures and crazy stories than most will want to hear.<\/p>\n

Often if you ramble on, people\u2019s eyes will begin to glaze over, which isn\u2019t necessarily intentional, just a product of not being able to understand. Friends and family won\u2019t really view your time away as \u2018real life,\u2019 for it is so far removed from home that they just won\u2019t understand. This isn\u2019t a bad thing, they\u2019ll spend lots of time catching you up on what you\u2019ve missed while away, catching you up on \u2018real life.\u2019<\/p>\n

Eventually you\u2019ll 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\u2019re beginning to question if it all really happened you\u2019ll get a belated Christmas card in the mail from an old housemate detailing adventures you weren\u2019t sure mattered anymore. Then a few days later you\u2019ll get an email from a Uni friend asking how \u2018life in America\u2019 is and reminding you of all the Australian shows you shared a liking for.<\/p>\n

These little reminders won\u2019t seem significant until a few more months go by and soon you\u2019ve been \u2018back\u2019 for almost as long as you were gone. Your friends abroad are still keeping in contact, and you\u2019ve just begun to feel normal in your \u2018real life\u2019 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 \u2018real life.\u2019 Sure, you took a \u2018break\u2019 from a life you\u2019d been living for all twenty years of your existence, but you weren\u2019t absent from the world for half a year. You were living a very different, yet very \u2018real life\u2019 somewhere else, so why is it so hard to connect the two?<\/p>\n

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 \u2018real life\u2019 will become a combination of your former \u2018home\u2019 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\u2019ll never completely know what or where \u2018real life\u2019 begins and ends. However, once you let go of trying to find it you\u2019ll find this isn\u2019t a bad thing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Expectations on Returning to Seattle You will quickly have to fall back into \u2018real life\u2019 as you\u2019ve only allotted a one-week interim between returning home and the start of winter quarter. It won\u2019t be easy to return to a grey and rainy Seattle winter, your weeks packed with classes, work, assignments, and obligations. Unfortunately for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[49],"tags":[17,66,30],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/chidint\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/748"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/chidint\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/chidint\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/chidint\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/33"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/chidint\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=748"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/chidint\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/748\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":856,"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/chidint\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/748\/revisions\/856"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/chidint\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=748"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/chidint\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=748"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/chidint\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=748"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}