After 325 days abroad, here I am sitting in my family’s house doing what I always do when I come home to visit. Eat, sleep, eat some more, enjoy the fact that I don’t have responsibilities and can just enjoy being. I keep trying to anticipate the emotions I’ll have after a year like I’ve just had but few of them are actually coming true. In fact, what’s hardest is justifying feeling two opposite extremes at once. For example:
1) I desperately want to be around people – it’s one of the things I already miss about leaving the team. It was the best and sometimes hardest family ever and I’ll never forget it. On the flip side, I just want to be left alone – left alone to think and process and reflect. I fear forgetting but have too much going on in my head to try and remember.
2) I’ve come home and it feels like a time warp. It’s like nothing happened. People are still doing what they were doing when I left. Jobs, relationships, friendships, school, etc. Sometimes, I feel like I’ve been dreaming for a year, I ask myself constantly “did that just happen?” Yet, it feels in some cases as though everything has changed! Siblings that have grown up, people that have died, babies that have been born, friends that have moved on to bigger and better things. I don’t know yet how I feel about it, but I definitely feel out of the loop and as if I’m playing a huge game of catch up.
3) My expectations for myself are just as confusing. I feel as though I should be utterly convicted for gorging myself on Thanksgiving dinner (after all I just spent a year learning about all the need in the world) – but I’m not. I feel as though people are expecting some profound revelation from my time spent abroad – maybe I do have one, but I don’t feel like I do – and I couldn’t articulate it if I did. On the flip side, I feel as if I’ve seen the other side of the veil. What I’ve done is coveted by others, I’ve been there, done that and it was so amazing I don’t know where to start. Honestly, trying to boil down stories has been incredibly difficult. Answering trivial questions such as “what’s the weirdest food you ate all year?” seems so hard to answer in the moment. But I do honestly feel a compassion I never did and I have no idea how to tell people about it.
4) It’s the holidays but I’m vacillating between being restless and wanting to feel busy and wanting nothing more than to relax and do absolutely nothing. I think I want to avoid feeling bored but at the same time feel an incredible need to let myself rest.
5) At the same time, I want to tell everyone about every detail of my experience and want people to stop asking about it. I feel as though I can hardly do justice to what I experienced this year but at the same time feel incredibly passionate about it.
Re-entry hasn’t really been that hard, in fact I’ve been somewhat indifferent about it. What we talked about for months on the race was how maybe coming home would just be one more change, one more new country to get used to. Besides the weird effects of jet-lag, coming home has been fine! I’ve enjoyed being with the family, unpacking (which took a surprisingly short amount of time to accomplish), setting up for Christmas, etc. That being said, I typed out a page and a half long list of bulleted topics I want to reflect on and journal about so I guess I have my work cut out for me.
To all my WR brothers and sisters on January 07- I’m so proud of you and think about you constantly. Don’t forget trusting God is the same here as it was on the field. I love you guys more than you know.
