Reintegration: The Reality of Reverse Culture Shock

Three years ago, I was hacking away at life through the haze of reverse culture shock, sometimes teetering on the brink of depression.  Someone mentioned reverse culture shock briefly at the study abroad orientation, but I laughed it off.  After I lived in a foreign country for 5 months, I was going to be HAPPY to be home.

False.

I got off the plane in May, and maybe around Halloween, I finally looked at life and felt like I could be completely happy.  It took almost as long as I had been abroad to finally fully reintegrate into my native culture.  Part of the problem is I had little awareness of the potential issues and no way to successfully work through it.  Also, I just really love Poland and I knew my heart would always be yearning to return.

After one year abroad, the idea of flying home and going through those feelings again is terrifying.  Adapting to Poland was super easy in 2010 and moderately difficult this time, but going home wasn't fun or exciting.  It felt difficult, predictable, and sometimes dull.  

A very good friend gave me one of the best analogies for understanding culture acquisition. Your native culture is blue and the foreign culture is yellow. When you first get to the foreign culture, you stick out a lot. As time progresses, you adapt a little bit and add in your new home's behaviors, gradually becoming more yellow. However, your foundation is blue, so instead of becoming yellow you turn green. When you go back to your native country, everyone expects you to be blue still, and they don't understand green.

After spending a year and a half of my adult life in Poland (30%!), it's safe to say I've turned a bit green.  Perhaps even greener than I suspect in some ways.  I've adapted to Polish customer service, Polish restaurant timing, Polish menus, Polish trains, and the Babcia Stare.  I have no problem paying a few zloty for a public restroom, think nothing of men in speedos, and prefer butter on my sandwiches.  

So I offer a few tips to battle slash avoid the post-abroad blues.  These are from my experience in 2010, and what I anticipate facing in the next two months of my own life.  

1. Be ready to give succinct, short answers.   Yes, your highschool/college/coworker friends missed you, but they're not interested in a half hour long spiel about the way a camel almost drooled on your half exposed calf as you road into a Saharan sunset.  
2. Things are going to be different.  Maybe you dealt with the death of a family member, or serious medical problems in your family from abroad.  Perhaps your parents sold your childhood home, or your best friend moved away.  In real life, these things kind of gradually dawn on us.  When it happens and you're on the other side of the world, the reality doesn't hit until you're home and sometimes the rush of emotions is overwhelming.  Take the time to sort them out.  
3. It's okay to move on.  Did your friend turn into someone you don't recognize while you were gone?  That realization can sting, but moving on from a friendship isn't the end of the world.  Throughout life friends come and go, whether or not you go abroad.
4. Find people who appreciate traveling.  Mom and dad or grandma or your best friend might appreciate looking through your photos, but chances are they haven't experienced the same lengthy cultural immersion.  Find someone who has traveled for long periods of time and talk to them, go to coffee.  Some of my most cathartic conversations were reminiscing with other study abroad returnees about our host countries.
5. Do not fall into the "I hate America" trap.  It's easy after being abroad (especially from my friends who went to 3rd world countries) to start hating on everything American.  Don't forget, you started 100% blue and it's only through a fantastic opportunity that you learned how another part of the world lives.  It doesn't mean everything in the U.S. is right or wrong, sometimes things are just different.
6.  BREATHE!  If your university experience was like mine, you raced nonstop from meetings to class to group meetings, and back to club meetings.  Returned home at 11 pm to start on your homework for the next day.  Sleep five or six hours and repeat.  Studying abroad, I learned to relax, enjoy quite time, and just love being alive!  Our class schedules were lighter than American universities, plus there weren't clubs offered.  So when I returned back to my university, everyone expected me to be energizer bunny and I couldn't keep up...which led to an epic meltdown midsemester.

I'm hoping that my awareness of the difficult transition will help me work though it much faster this time around.  The dangers of reverse culture shock are incredibly real.  It sucks sometimes, almost like morning the loss of a dear friend.  As time goes on, you miss your host country less frequently, but there is a part of you that is perpetually altered for having been immersed in something different for so long.