Post-Remote Year: Part I
One month of life back in the States.
One of the things that I never really saw about Remote Year, aside from a fair reflection of the pros and cons of an individual’s experience, was what life was like after those 12 months were up. Funnily enough, it never really occurred to me to wonder about that before joining the program. Only while in it did I really begin to care.
In all honesty, I’m not entirely sure how many “parts” these post-Remote Year entries will have. It could be 1, it could be 3, it could be 5. But I do know that I want to make the effort to capture and reflect on what transitioning home has been like as well as comment on the Remote Year company itself. I don’t really imagine myself getting beyond 2 parts, but then again I’m not so much about committing to anything these days.
In the last month before flying back to NYC, I was very set on not moving around much once I was back. I’d come home to the city, stay in one spot for longer than a month, unpack all of my things in my apartment and have options to choose from when it came to the clothes I wore, the vast variety of food I could eat in my neighborhood, and the number of familiar faces I could hang out with at any given time.
Well, it turns out that feeling of wanting to stay put lasted exactly one week.
During the month of June I’ve taken 4 flights, 2 interstate buses, 2 cars and 1 Amtrak train to 4 states and 5 cities across the country. I’m currently on a train up to Boston where I’ll be for the next 4 days—partially for work and partially for fun. I’ve met with friends almost every single night, hung out with 11 Remote Year friends around the US and have plans to visit another 2 of them next month in a new state I haven’t been to before. Apparently, I didn’t actually want to slow down.
I’ve also donated 2/3 of my boxed up clothes because either they no longer fit me or I accepted the fact I finally needed to toss them. I’ve purged a majority of the clutter from 3 rooms in my apartment and whittled down what I actually care about into 2 suitcases. I live with much less, I own much less, and whatever I have kept either has sentimental value or serves a purpose. Life feels lighter this way and it’s mainly because I’ve lived out of a suitcase and a backpack for the last 12 months. I’ve gotten the desire to buy “things” pretty much entirely out of my system and am keeping my money for people and places.
Nothing back home has really changed in a year. And the US is also pretty damn disturbing.
After doing study abroad for 5 months in England from 2007–2008, I realized upon coming back some surprising things about US culture that hadn’t dawned on me before. I was 21 at the time so the loudness of voices, the need for large amounts of space, meal portion sizes as well as food quality were things that I had never fully realized before. It was a hard adjustment back home from European life.
This time coming back however, being 10 years older and spending a year abroad, realizations go much deeper than the surface level concerns of volume control and plate sizes. I don’t know if it’s because of who I surrounded myself with the last year, the situations we encountered, or just simply the fact that I’m older, but there are things about US society that have deeply bothered me the last 4 weeks. Examples include the subtle and also often not-so-subtle racism that is literally everywhere nearly all the time; the relentless and sometimes suffocating message of consumerism; the deep cultural insensitivity purely because in America, it’s drilled into everyone’s heads to believe that we’re #1 (we’re not). And this is all coming from traveling to major cities in Washington, Illinois, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts—not even Middle America or tiny towns within each of those states.
I don’t feel as though I fully fit in anywhere. So it looks like the limbo game until I figure it out.
Before I came back to NYC, I thought a lot about what I wanted my first few days to be like. So I asked to spend the weekend with a friend and his wife in upstate NY doing normal, boring, every day things of minimal excitement. I wanted to hit pause on my rapid travel pace and take time to catch my breath. I really thought that was the right move.
It turns out that was a decent-sized mistake because all it ended up doing was give me time to think. To not necessarily reflect on the last year, though I did that too, but it gave way for all the emotions to bubble up to the surface. The emotions of missing my friends still down in Chile and beginning to scatter around the world, the feelings of being a bit resentful I had to come back to the US at all, and of course the feelings of not belonging here. That last set bubbled up pretty prominently while listening to a conversation about closing processes on a house and how much property taxes might be for a place in sort-of-but-not-really upstate NY. While not being able to contribute anything to that conversation, nor really caring about it, I fully realized just how out of place and lonely I was.
I had only been back in the States for 2 days.
A vast majority of my friends are getting married, having kids and buying homes. It’s what they want and also what US culture has drilled into our heads since we were kids. I’m super happy for them, since they all seem genuinely happy following that path. But this is what I’ve been told over and over that it’s what I should be doing, and if I play the game correctly I win and achieve success as an adult. Except, I don’t want that.
Turns out I have some life shit I need to figure out. Thanks, Remote Year.
I read an article by a fellow Remote Year participant named Mike Sholars. He was in the group before mine, finished a couple months ahead of us, and has written some wonderfully hilarious (and truthful) pieces about his experience. One piece that he wrote, 12 For 12: Realities Of Living As A Digital Nomad, had a particularly relevant line in it about who chooses to do a program like this one and upheave their entire lives for it:
“You don’t uproot your life to travel with a group of 70+ strangers under the control of a relatively untested startup unless you’ve got some shit going on, you know?”
Nailed it.
I figured out a ton of things about myself over the last year and put personal growth and development into warp speed. That was awesome. What hasn’t been so awesome though, is coming back to the US and trying to figure out what that all means. Not only for my career, but for life. And one of the joys (that’s sarcasm) in all this is knowing that there are just some things I can’t have the answer to, or won’t have the answer to, until I’m in the experience. That goes for deciding on where to live, where to work, who to work with and when I buy that next flight out of the country. Because all of these things are definitely not a matter of if, but when.
I’ve gotten markedly better with handling ambiguity, with spontaneity, with fuzzy misshapen problems that don’t have defined solutions, and just understanding that it figures itself out along the way. It doesn’t mean I enjoy it, it just means I understand it better and this uncertainty doesn’t bother me nearly as much as it did before.
Transitioning home is weird, but not the kind of fun weird I had transitioning to new countries and continents all over the world. I haven’t fallen right back into familiar old life partially because I’m making conscious efforts to not fall into all of my old habits. And partially because I owe it to myself to not let Remote Year be just this one cool thing I did for a year and then didn’t do anything with.
I want this past year to be a launch pad for what I do next…I just need to figure out what that is. And because adulting in the US is seemingly all about brunch, paying bills and procrastinating on anything important, I’m adulting pretty hard right now and letting those important decisions happen at the end of the summer. And as another Remote Year participant from another group, Molly Falco, said in her post back in January 2017 entitled 247: After,
“There’s a threshold that exists in travel, an invisible one that hooks so many unwitting nomads all the same. There’s a line you cross, where you’ve seen too much, and your body and your heart and your entire being resist going back to the blindness that was before.”
I can’t, shouldn’t and won’t go back to how blind I was to the world and all its opportunities before.
