Everyone always talks about how studying abroad is such an amazing challenge. You push yourself to be independent and do things you never thought you ever would. You live on your own and explore the world around you.
No one told you how difficult it would be to come back home.
At first, you get excited.
You get to reconnect with the people who knew you, or at least who you were before you left. You get excited to see these people who rightfully continued on with their life in the past six months. You get excited when they ask about your time away.
They listen to the adjectives you conjure up to describe a time in your life that changed you, and they nod their head and move on to their life again.
After the first couple weeks, you hear from more people wanting to reconnect but eventually it ends. These friends go back to their lives and you must go on with yours in this new place that used to be called home. Whether or not you would like to admit it, living abroad causes a change, which can be very hard to deal with.
Processing the experience you had is hard enough, but also finding who you are once you're back home is difficult as well. Everything is extremely familiar and comforting, but you don't fit the way you did before, which is scary. Your best friends don't really seem like people you'd want to be friends with anymore. Priorities you had once before seem unimportant and meaningless. You feel trapped by the closed-mindedness of others, and miss the travelers you met abroad.
Take the time to process it all. Whether that means sitting down and journalling about it, hiking alone, or creating art... Do what you can so that you can feel at peace about starting a new chapter in an old familiar place.
