Stateside

Reverse culture shock is real

If you’ve been reading No Half-Measures for a while, you’ll know that I began it as a way for people to follow along as we moved overseas for Nate’s job with the U.S. Department of State. I took an unpaid leave of absence from my teaching job at a private liberal arts college in Maine, and we left for Gabon in October, 2024.

At first, I wrote weekly dispatches chronicling our lives in the Foreign Service, interweaving memoir and travelogue along the way. My audience grew, which was nice, but invariably, some of the attention has been unwanted. My work started drawing scrutiny, so I temporarily shifted away from much of anything to do with where we were, or why.

Most of the people I’ve met have been really wonderful; one friend in particular became my Foreign Service “big sister” (even though I’m a little older) because she and her husband have served for years, at multiple overseas posts. And a neighbor was my go-to person when I needed help understanding and processing some things about living in Central Africa in particular.

But as with every embassy community, with the annual turnover of people leaving and coming in, it’s not the same place year to year. Nate and I arrived at the end of the PCS (“Permanent Change of Station”) season, which meant that almost everyone we were close to left ahead of us. We’d been told say yes to every invitation for the first six or so months, just to have the experiences and meet people, but after that, you’re allowed to choose, use your discretion, not feel obligated to participate in everything.

We took that to heart. I think, also, at middle age, my tolerance for being in situations I don’t 100% want to be in has reached zero. Disgust at the behavior of some members of the community (things like treating the local staff with contempt) made these decisions very easy. Being afforded the privileges we have been at this stage in our lives – living and working abroad, traveling, being immersed in new (to us) cultures – we are mindful that, as Annie Dillard wrote, “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

I am back in Maine for the start of the fall semester now, but our lives will be lived all over the world for the foreseeable future. I’ll be joining Nate wherever he is when I can, on breaks during the academic year and over the summers, and No Half-Measures will continue to describe where I am and what I’m thinking about at any given time, in a college writing classroom or Krakow, Poland or somewhere in Africa again.

In one of Maine’s ubiquitous, extremely white coastal towns: lobster kitsch and $16 breakfast sandwiches.

My younger daughter picked me up at the airport last weekend and we stopped for a night on the coast just to give me a chance to breathe and acclimate. I slept for twelve hours. When we stepped out in the early sunshine to walk to breakfast, the smell of freshly-cut grass hit me; I said “whoa” under my breath and my daughter knew what I meant: “You haven’t smelled that in two years!”

Of course there is grass in other places, but this grass, this smell, this particular Eastern U.S. latitude and season and climate, is unique. My brain needs to catch up to the fact that I’m back for more than a minute and my body will help it get there.

The biggest change in my understanding of the world has to do with abundance and waste. Many of us have no sense of how very privileged we are, how soft we are, how easy we have it. That is not to say that our lives aren’t hard in certain and different ways, of course. But if you even have the words “breakfast, lunch, and dinner” in your vocabulary, you are set apart from the global majority. For so many people, millions and millions of people, there is either food or there is not.

Over the next few months, as I transition back to a life here, I’ll describe how my perceptions have changed and continue to change. The biggest thing is that I don’t ever want to rush anywhere, ever again. I hope I’m able to hold onto the belief, shared with me by someone in a village we spent some time in recently, that “…time isn’t real. The trees don’t know it’s Tuesday, and we don’t care.”

Thank you for being here, and I hope you’ll continue to follow along.