Why Getting Home Again Takes So Long

“We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are”

-       Anaïs Nin

            Although transitions and paradigm shifts are always tough to get through, I find that dealing with perceptions may be even more treacherous. I am now in my second year of “beginning” to transition from teaching overseas to coming back home to the United States. I have read and been aware of what is called “reverse shock” when you come back to the life you once knew, but I could never understand how rugged that terrain was until I began walking it.

            Heading home, after 17 years working overseas, began almost a year before any decision or announcement was made. Inside I knew it was time to head home, but making the physical leap into the unknown world of repatriation has proven much more taxing to me than when I began my travels so many years ago. Every day your mind debates whether this is the best move you can make at this point for you and your family. Some days, you long for home; and others, you opt for the security of what you have come to know. It is then you realize that your wanderings have produced a wonderful adventure that you would never have traded for the world, but traveling is not a preparation for coming home at all.

            And it feels foreign and strange. It is difficult to explain to people as they wonder what is so hard about coming home. What you begin to realize is not that the world or you have changed that much, just that you are now more misunderstood. Seeing things and living among so many different cultural, social, and political perspectives may broaden your own, but it doesn’t really change your core identity. But try telling that to others.

            Living in South Korea, Saudi Arabia, and China helped me understand these cultures more but it hasn’t kept me from putting people into stereotypical boxes in my mind (even if I don’t say it aloud). I know that the “typical” Korean, Middle Eastern, or Chinese student is anything but typical, but that doesn’t seem to have changed my deepest perceptions any more than my quick judgment of someone being “so young,” “so liberal,” or “so uneducated” still affects the way I perceive a person. If anything, I have tried to quiet those bias a bit more. What is hard though, is when I realize that I am returning to my home and will now be perceived as “an international teacher,” “a world traveler,” or “more of a free spirit.” These labels may well be true, but what I cannot control are the connotations associated with those words in other peoples’ minds or even how those labels are perceived.

            As I face coming back into teaching in the United States, I seem to be bringing a lot of perceptual baggage that I was unaware I would be charged for. Although never overtly voiced, there is a quiet dismissal of resumes with too much overseas or international teaching listed as experience. One international blogger writes that “five years teaching overseas might as well be a blank space on your resume.” I can only imagine how utterly confounding my 17 years overseas must be to employers who receive my applications.

            And that’s how perceptions can be so incredibly damaging. The things that may broaden our horizons sometimes places us in even more confined boxes because we dared to push the envelope. It is something I experienced while overseas as well when I found that I was suddenly the minority, and I was being judged unfairly because of the cultural milieu I was a part of. But what I never expected was how silently marginalized I would feel when I began to return home.

            When I was unable to get any teaching positions last fall, I decided to take another year overseas. This time in Denmark. Alone. I have always enjoyed traveling and going to new places, but the perceptions of me as an American, who has spent most of his life teaching in Asia, and is now in Scandinavia, has created too many labels for the people around me, and I seem to have become a curious anomaly. It has helped me understand more deeply the outsider-like feeling that consistently haunts all TCKs (third-culture kids) and global nomads. And I realize even using those labels create perceptions in those of you reading this as to what kind of people I am talking about. And perhaps that is the root of the problem – we react too often based on our perceptions and feelings rather than an acceptance of people who may well (and almost always do) defy labels.

            So, as I once more attempt reentry into this American life, I will be fighting for recognition as someone who is trying to push past the perceptions. But don’t be too quick to label me naïve or even rebellious as I do so because like everyone else, I believe understanding is greater than perception. And I will continue to teach that lesson in every classroom I find myself.