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I Returned Home After Being Stuck Abroad for 2.5 Years — Here Are 5 Things I’ve Learned

№5: “Home” is just another name for Stockholm syndrome.

Adam Aushaf
Assemblage
8 min readAug 14, 2022

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Photo by Jack Cohen on Unsplash

In February 2020, I made one of the biggest decisions of my life so far: I left my home country, Indonesia, and moved to Australia.

I remember being so excited. “It’s gonna be an adventure;” I thought, “A brand new chapter. A clean slate.”

Little did I know, a certain pandemic was brewing all around the globe. Humanity was taken by storm — people would die, borders would close, and cities would go into lockdowns. Melbourne, the city I moved into then, would soon be known as the “most locked-down city in the world.”

I never imagined that my adventure would instead turn out to be an exile. It was, hands down, one of the hardest periods of my life. I couldn’t go home for 2.5 years, and during that time I had no contact with my family and friends back home, save for the occasional video calls and social media exchanges.

Eventually, borders reopened, and in July 2022 I returned home to Indonesia for a few weeks. A lot of expectations flew into my mind after being away for so long. Needless to say, not all of them aligned with reality.

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Assemblage
Assemblage

Published in Assemblage

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Adam Aushaf
Adam Aushaf

Written by Adam Aushaf

No longer writing on Medium. Read my essays for free on Substack: aushaf.substack.com.

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