One of my friends I’d met abroad sent me this article a while back. I must’ve been living in either Spain or China at the time. I’ve read a lot of those kind of articles about what happens when one travels. However this one always stayed with me because one part of it seemed pretty cynical:
…life at home carried on as before. People went to work, they did the groceries, they holidayed, they had birthdays, they got married, they changed jobs and they moved house…And while everything appears to have stayed the same, the truth is that life moved on without you… …This is a huge price to pay with moving abroad. You can have the adventures and the experiences but you can’t have “them.” You’re missing everything from the life you had before and all you can do is watch from the sidelines as people carry on… …Some have tried and succeeded, others have failed. The problem is that your former life moved on, you moved on, and all the time you both moved apart… …Over time, phone calls drop off, emails are less frequent, contact lessens. You’ll never lose your friends and your family will always be family. But you’ll matter less to them and they’ll figure less in your new world.
I came home from China in November 2014. At the time I was itching to come back, but then I’m always itching to be somewhere new after a while. I planned to go to Japan the following March. I had secured the job offer I’d been chasing since university, even bought my ticket and was ready to go. But then a once in a lifetime opportunity presented itself (see the other blog I wrote for).
To Japan! ready, set…no.
I stayed to work on the start-up with my BFF through most of 2015. We were thrown together nearly everyday and our friendship was well and truly tested. I enjoyed working on the start-up; I was busy, involved in something, meeting new people with new challenges every week and I loved it. But soon it died and I was left with nothing as exciting. I had got a part time ESL teaching job that I wasn’t really passionate about, just needing it to pay TFL for the privilege of moving about London.
When the start-up folded I went full time with the language school, eventually being cajoled into the Assistant Director position simply because it came up; it would do great things for my CV and I was basically a shoe in. I lasted 3 months before I had to quit for the first time in my life.
It’s now May 2016 and I’m working 2 part time jobs. The reason I’m working two part time jobs is less a financial one…(One part time job was enough as TFL weren’t guzzling my cash because my commute was a 15 minute cycle) …and more a social one. I was frequently without anything to do nor anyone to do it with. I was bored when my friends were at work. I got into a pseudo relationship that lasted probably longer than it should have because he had so much time for me and in him I had somewhere to go; something to do and someone to do it with.
When that ended because he started seeing someone else but failed to tell me, I was all alone so I looked for my friends but they seemed harder to find. I’ve never had a large group of friends anyway, preferring the one-to-one interaction but my one-to-ones that I had so much time for didn’t have time for me. And I realised that what I was looking forward to when I went ‘home’ wasn’t the same anymore. Home had got used to not having me there, so the me-shaped space that once was had been contorted as people grew, evolved and carved out new spaces for themselves.
I had also grown and evolved and so even if the me-shaped space were still there I wouldn’t fit into it anymore either. And I did notice that phone calls (or lets face it SMS messages; it is 2016) had dropped off, people no longer invited me to do things together and contact did indeed lessen. Very frequently I felt myself watching my friends lives happen from the sidelines while mine seemed to stagnate.
I suppose the only thing to do is to pursue my own goals and dreams even if that takes me in a direction away from what I once knew. They say home is where your heart is, but if where you put your heart doesn’t exist anymore then where or rather what is it that you can always go back to?