Arriving "Home": an Expat Paradox

The plane touches down, and you're no longer a traveler.So this is home, you think.

Home, but not home: the foremost paradox of expat life.

You're tired in body and mind and spirit, because you've been awake for umpteen hours, trying to get little ones to sleep on the plane or at least keep them occupied…so you haven't had a quiet moment to ponder the hugeness of moving abroad.

You'll ponder later. Now is time to experience.You want to take in everything around you, but it's too overwhelming to process. You're excited and apprehensive and drained. So at first, all you can do is sleep, waking up hungry at odd times.

When you're rested and fed, you regret that the practical stuff took up most of your last few weeks; the goodbyes were rushed, buried in a flurry of decisions and packing. You tell yourself to be sad later. It's time to push on and find out what you've gotten yourself into.

The first few days are a firehose of new information, new places, new smells, new tastes—and varied emotion. It's crying over things that broke in the suitcase and fretting over stuff you're sure you packed somewhere. It's being thrilled with a restaurant just down the street and being disappointed when something should taste familiar and doesn't. It's the awkwardness of meeting so many people when your body still wants to be asleep at noon and the joy of a first conversation with someone who will become a soul-friend.

It's loneliness before you have internet and cell phone service, and loneliness even when you finally have it because everyone you want to talk to is still asleep on the other side of the world.It's adrenaline rushing when someone speaks to you in the language you've been practicing, but this time it's not practice. It's blushing and feeling tongue-tied at first and being ecstatic with success when you find your voice and they understand you.

It's the ache of missing your mother and squeezing your own kids tight when they need your reassurance. It's feeling like your actions are magnified, that people are staring, that you stick out just walking down the street.It's finally pausing for that quiet moment to ponder. It's beginning to carve your day into a routine.

It's celebrating lots of small victories.

It's finding treasures and taking pictures and Googling recipes so you know how to use that vegetable you bought at the market. It's being treated like a tourist even though you aren't one; living in the culture but not being part of it.Wading into local life is an adventure, but a messy one where sometimes you get on the wrong bus and have to take the longer, less convenient route. It doesn't feel Instagram-worthy until you're safely back home again.Arrival is looking around and seeing your familiar things in unfamiliar rooms, knowing that soon you'll forget they ever felt new.

This is home, you think. But I still miss home.

You realize you're becoming more comfortable with paradoxes.

You are truly an expat now.

How did you feel your first few days living abroad? How long before you felt like it was home?