The hardest part of traveling no one talks about.

Returning home after traveling for a while out in the world, you are met with the smiling, eager faces of friends and family who are excited to hear about your stories and adventures... for ten minutes hehe. “It’s a funny thing, coming home. Nothing changes. Everything looks the same, feels the same, even smells the same. You realize what’s changed is you”. - F. Scott Fitzgerald

Hugs exchanged, catch ups completed, stories told, your loved ones are have a summary of how you have spent the past X amount of months of your life and expect that you will easily slip straight back into life as you knew it before traveling, but as anyone who has lived overseas or traveled for long periods of time will know, it’s not quite as simple as that.

People talk about culture shock when you traveling to countries that differ a lot, like going like a “swede” to crazy india alone, everyone is worried and curious about how it went, how I felt, and I get that. But seriously, we need to talk about reverse culture shock...

Coming back and adjusting to life after living abroad can be difficult. I have been back in Sweden a few weeks now after spending the past year overseas. This isn’t the first time that I’ve left and came back after an extended period, but the transition never gets easier.

When you arrive back on home, friends, family, and acquaintances await you exactly as you left them, still following their same routines - the same social circles mixed with, going to same bars and restaurants, but yet it all feels different somehow. It isn’t them that has changed, it’s you.

I feel a strange sense of detachment from everything and everyone around me, somewhat unmotivated to see or do anything. Those who surround you simply cannot understand why it is that you just can’t go back to the way things were, querying why you don’t like the place anymore. Only a fellow traveler who has felt the same reverse culture shock can identify with you, I suppose in a similar sort of way as people with children refer to some life situations as being things that “only other parents can understand”.

And it’s absolutely true when people claim that you can be surrounded by many people and still feel completely alone. You have no-one around that can relate to all of that which you have experienced.

Sometimes it feels difficult to recall tales from the road around your friends at home without make them feel like you try to make them jealous. Reaching out to friends from the road and joking about these feelings can make you feel a little bit better, but not in whole.

Traveling the world gives you a whole new perception of the meaning “home.” The people that you now identify with the most, and care so deeply about are scattered quite literally all over the world. You feel a sense of belonging in many places, which it's beautiful.

This is why once you’ve traveled for the first time all you want to do is leave again. They call it the travel bug, but really, it’s amazing to return to a place where you are surrounded by likeminded people who speak the same language as you. Not english, not swedish or spanish, but that language where others know what it’s like to leave, change, grow, experience, learn, then go home again and feel more lost in your hometown then you did in the most foreign place you visited. For me this is the hardest part about traveling, and I guess it’s one of the reasons why we all run away again.