Lost in transit

My wife made me! Now that she has US citizenship and our finances are shaping up, we're thinking about returning to Europe for at least part of the year.

I left Japan when I realized I was starting to think of Japanese people as a unified, single group, and one which I didn't much like. If I can't treat people as individuals, then it ceases to be interesting for me. I left a great job (and turned down a promotion and a crazy good raise), a few good friends, an incredible apartment, and some cultural aspects I still miss today. I returned to a US economy in a craptastic slump and a boyfriend who broke up with me some 6 months after I returned. I wish I had thought more about what I was returning to, instead of what I was leaving, because I might not have left. BUT altogether I'm glad I did, because I left before I was completely sour, and if I'd stayed even one more year I think I would have turned into a utter and irrevocable asshole. A rich and comfortable one, but an asshole nevertheless.

Yes, that's how it feels - sour. This and the loss of interest. I had a friend from Romania here today. She is so excited and enthusiastic about Vienna. I used to be like that, but it's all gone. It's like "It's all done, what am I here for any longer?"

Someone is trying to convince me to go to Toronto. Sounds like a solution, but then again - it also sounds like "the same old mistake". I hope my intuition proves me right.

It seems so much easier when you go together or somebody pulls you in his/her slipstream.

Last year I felt like I reached the "sell by" date on my expat carton. It felt like I ate nothing but cheese and looked at nothing but green green meadows, someone shoot me already. I realize this is more about me than about the cheese and the meadows, but I Just Could Not Stand It.

I don't think I'm actually done, but good god, do I feel like it. When you start walking around saying stupid, stupid, shit like, "I am SO over Europe," well, that's a good indication of done-ness.

But when you went back - did you go "home"? Meaning to a place where you lived before and where you had a social network?

I left expatness mainly because husband's job expired, and it would have been professional suicide to extend the contract. I liked it there, on balance, and we definitely miss the friends we have/had there, especially because things started really developing in the second year. But the weather was really wearing me down, and I'm not sure my mental health would have been the best if I'd had to go through another hot season anyway. So it was mixed relief and loss that I felt, moving on.

I don't really have much of a sense of any place being "home". It might be due to moving a couple of times during childhood, then going away to university, and my parents leaving the "family home" at the same time to move to another town. There was also the thing about having to move every 2 to 5 years because of rental issues - within the same city, but never really unpacking, in a way.

We didn't come back "home" to Brisbane but I feel at home (as much as I can) in Melbourne anyway - many friends had moved here over the previous few years, and there are relatives here, and I'd been visiting the city several times a year for a number of years anyway, so it felt quite easy to slip back in to Australia. A whole new set of furniture had to be bought, but there are all the old books and cups and things, plus some of the stuff from Oman.

But I don't know how long we'll stay in this house (rental uncertainty, again), and we really don't know what we'll be doing, say, 5 years from now. So I'm enjoying it while I can, but there is an undercurrent of unease.

So I haven't thrown away the packing boxes.

There are no losses I can see, apart from being at the arse end of the world again, and missing my friends in Oman. I would have been delighted to move to, say, Europe or Canada; but it didn't turn out that way, work-wise. It makes me a bit sad, but I can't do much about it.

Well, nothing's certain yet, since I have no plane ticket out, a visa that will expire in June, and some potential job interviews coming up, but even if I land a job I'm not sure if I'll stay here. The distance and time differences are really hard for me, and I feel like I live a sort of half-life, staying up late to talk to people in the UK and the US to make up for the lack of people I know here. Also, like Pam said, I'm pretty 'over' Australia. There was a lot I used to think charming about it, and now I feel like it's pretty mundane and sometimes really annoying (do not get me started on the shockingly bad broadband here), and I don't feel like I really click with Australians in general. I just don't feel like I belong here, I guess.
Of course the problem is I don't really want to go back to the US, either, but I probably won't have much choice for now. When I have nowhere else to go, NYC is still 'home'.

Ah! The old "Seven Year Itch!" It'sa conversation that I've had countless times with countless expats.

To quote my friend Pam, it does seem that many expats have an expiration date on their cartons. That date seems to be five to seven years out.

In my own case, I spent my first year in Spain 100% intrigued and infatuated with the cultural differences. I spent my second and third years trying very hard to internalize them and make them my own. I spent the fourth year fighting a seismic shift within me. By my fifth year, all I wanted to do was drink Starbucks coffee, go shopping at WalMart and eat hog dogs at Wrigley Field.

My body has now been in Spain eight years. My mind left Spain long ago.

That said, I think that the most important thing for any expat is to ALWAYS HAVE A VIABLE EXIT STRATEGY!

If you have one, then most cultural irritations and the ever-increasing bad days abroad can be quite tolerable. But when an unhappy expat wakes up one morning and realizes that he doesn't have an exit strategy or, contrarily, that the exit strategy he once had is no longer viable...well, that is the day when expat life *really* becomes a nightmare.

There's an important book lurking within all of this, my friends. And when that book gets written, let's hope that the next generation reads carefully and takes it to heart.

Sal in Spain

Yeah, I went back "home" - though truth be told - and this may contribute to the problem - I never really left home. Every month I spent in Austria was punctuated by a "You know I'm not moving to Austria, right?" conversation. I kept my Seattle flat, though I rented it out many times.

On the other hand, I like to rationalize that I did make the effort on the Austrian side. I had a job for a while, though I had to commute to Salzburg, I went to Deutsch als Fremdensprache classes, learned to ski, relaxed my vegetarian diet, etc...

But I never embraced Austria, like some expats do, as my new "home." I never intended to spend so much time there.

"My body has now been in Spain eight years. My mind left Spain long ago."

Yep, replace Spain with Austria and that's it.

You are right about the exit strategy. When I left Germany, I didn't book a return ticket.

But now I also don't know where to get all the energy from to start all over again. I have done that so many times and it gets more difficult each time.

I have never considered myself an expat, until a few years ago when the term started being tossed around the www. I guess I am an expat, except I have about 3 different countries that I can call "home" without even thinking about it. There are only a few places in this world where I could not accomodate, largely due to the climate and my physical limits. I have not always chosen my new home, others did it for me. So when I wanted to leave, I just looked for a place that suited me and left. I know it sounds simple, and it wasn't, but the concept was simple. When you have already uprooted yourself, the world is your playground, everything else is logistics. I believe we make decisions to go or not to go based on our "root depth", then we blame it on logistics.

If we have to move every 7 years - moving around never stops, doesn't it? ;-)

Hey, did somebody say 'book'?

We could call it, "Exit Strategy".

My relationship with Austria has gone through various phases. At the moment, I'm pretty over many aspects of this place, but I can't get enthusiastic about moving to any other place in particular.

My wife and kids would like to move to Seattle. They like REI and Starbucks.

I never really developed an exit strategy because I wasn't planning to exit. I suppose I'm at the beginning of a process of assessing my options.

Oh yeah, if I were a carton of milk they would have thrown me out years ago. But I guess I've turned more bitter than sour. I've lived in Germany for 17(!) years now and I haven't really been "here" in spirit for about the past 10. Unfortunately I'm also one of those expats who doesn't have an exit strategy, or at least one that wouldn't involve messing up a bunch of other people's lived in the process of exiting. My husband is German, not a risk taker and not willing to start over in my home country, although he does agree with my standard of living (Germany) vs. quality of life (Canada) argument. We also have two school-aged children - it's not like the decision to leave would be mine alone to make. That's why I stay. I don't want to be here, yet here I am.

Here i was beginning to think maybe the reason i feel content after six years in Germany is that i have a German SO.

Generally, i think it's been easier for me than for a lot of expats i know to assimilate here because I came here after having spent 8 years in Japan. Relatively speaking, at least at first, the cultural differences hardly seemed worth mentioning. Plus, I could speak the language fairly fluently when i first arrived and had very welcoming "inlaws" which eased the first few years of transition enormously.

Sometimes, like recently, I feel a bit restless. I long alternately for the excitement of exploring a new place and for a return to the familiar, but as others have said, my sense of where "home" would be exactly is getting blurrier all the time. The longer I'm away, the more foreign home begins to feel. Not sure how much to attribute this feeling to changes in me or subtle shifts in the cultural/social landscape back home.

I said to my little sister that after 15 years abroad and three countries, going back to the States would almost be like moving to yet another foreign country.

woops, screwed up typing my info above. hope this works!

sorry, got so distracted by all the responses above that forgot to respond to the original question.

Recently, i was weighing the pros and cons of moving to Holland. I took a hard look at my life here and my prospective life there and realized moving most likely wouldn't bring a net improvement, merely a few changes and the stress of starting over.

It seemed to me that the impulse to move had more to do with my own rambling spirit than with the pros or cons of living in either place. But, as i said above, i'm pretty content with my life here overall, so it wasn't such a hard decision and i'm still not sure i won't move on in a few years to another European city.

Hey, thanks everyone for your comments. In each of your answers I find something I can relate to. It's interesting to know that expats share common issues and thoughts.

Expiration date in many other places would not have the cachet that it has here in bloody Rio de Janeiro. And I don't mean the British "bloody" as in "hell". I mean the American "bloody" as in
emergency rooms. Yes, our time has expired, however, thankfully not in the bloody Rio sort of way. Just tired of dodging bullets, tired of waking up mornings and hearing how many innocent bystanders and children were shot to hell during the night. Never want to relive the night where we woke up to the sound of machine gun fire. Never want to hear again how there was a tiroteiro 20 minutes after we moved our boat, or 20 minutes before in the traffic tunel, forcing us to sit in the tunel for 2 hours while machine gun armed police run around your car. We will just be bloody gone, in the British sense, very soon. Inspite of this I blog cheerfully, not wanting to alarm anyone I know personally.