No place like home
A little over a year ago I returned to the town where I grew up, having spent five years living in Finland. Old friends or acquaintances I’d run into would say: “It must be good to be home!”, and “I bet you don’t miss those winters!” Except it wasn’t, and I did. I felt like a stranger in a strange land, yet everyone knew me. Everything looked the same, but everything looked wrong. Reverse culture shock following repatriation can hit you harder than you would ever expect and many return home only to discover that home isn’t where they thought they left it.
We moved back to Scotland after five years in Finland, out of practicality rather than desire and with only one month to prepare an entire home removal with a newborn baby in tow. The combination of learning to be a parent and coping with severe repatriation shock and a massive house move is still sending ripples through my life a year and a half later.
I’m half-Finnish but spent most of my life in Scotland so it’s not like I didn’t experience some degree of culture shock moving to Finland. Finns are known for their quiet reserve; they will speak if they have something to say, but small talk is pretty much non-existent. The west of Scotland… not so much so; it’s all small talk and jokes and simply saying “hello” can take up to 10 minutes. The Finnish reserve suited me well, but sometimes I did start to feel invisible as I’d greet acquaintances with a cheery wave, and a “hello, how are you, that’s a cosy looking hat!” only to receive a curt nod in return. They knew and I knew that an answer was not actually expected to the “how are you?” and the deeply inane comment about the hat simply came out automatically because in the west Scotland village I’m from a bit of chat about (and this is crucial) “*nothing in particular” is expected when you say hello.
In Finland you only ask a question if you want to know the answer. You raise a topic of conversation if you actually want to discuss it in relative depth. Otherwise you keep your mouth shut and mind your own business. I see the sense in this way of being, I grew to love it, and ultimately it was my fault for asking a question that wasn’t a question but merely a protracted hello when I knew full well that that wasn’t how it worked in Finland.
However, certain social interactions and expectations can be pretty deeply hard-wired and it takes time to reprogramme your mind, so in the first few months or even years it did sometimes make me feel lonely. Until I realised that when people asked me in Finland how I was, it was because they actually wanted to know, they actually cared. Twenty people could ask me that in a day in Scotland, but none of them would actually care. This was one of the many ways I adjusted and assimilated into my new life in Finland, as bit by bit I undid my old social and cultural programming.
Clicking your ruby fingernails
Maybe you are living abroad now, missing home, and feel like clicking your ruby fingernails on a one-way ticket back “home”. Go if you have to, but be prepared to discover that the tornado may have moved your home far from where you left it. I thought I’d left mine in the hills and glens of Scotland, but I’m a stranger in a strange land now. I wear hats. The lack of hats in the winter scenes of Game of Thrones causes me actual anguish. I button up my jacket right to the chin, unlike the girls who go out clubbing in January in Glasgow in a minidress and no jacket. I take my shoes off when I enter a house. I’m irritated by small talk, especially when I’m asked a question that clearly does not expect an actual answer. The bus driver doesn’t play Dio. Ever.
I’m in Scotland now, listening to the rain, longing for blue skies. “Oh, but it rains in Finland,” my Finnish friends tell me. “Sometimes for three days.” Three days? Try three months. And, they’re talking about rain that falls downwards, the kind an umbrella might offer some protection against. That’s not our rain. No. Rain here comes at you horizontally, from in front, behind and either side of you. It even comes at you from below. All at once. 70mph gusts will hurl rain down your raincoat and into your underpants. Alternatively it may reach your underpants by being blown up your trouser leg. The method of pant-soaking is variable, but the end result is the same: red raw skin, soaked and wind burnt even to the buttocks.
A Finnish blizzard may be bad, but you can go to the shop and back in 10 minutes without having to stop to chat about the weather with everyone you pass. It took me an hour and a half this morning to go buy a loaf of bread (I say bread, but if throwing it at someone doesn’t cause injury, it’s not really bread: Finnish rye bread is something quite special).
Oh, it’s beautiful here. My window looks into a fjord. The light changes constantly, clouds gallop across the sky, mist caresses hilltops. It’s breathtaking. I love it, I really do, it sings to my soul and I understand why artists are drawn by the ever-shifting light over the sea. In my cosy triple-glazed flat in Helsinki, I may have shed a tear dreaming of my misty mountains. But you can’t live in a painting.
“You’ll be used to cold, coming from Finland,” everyone says to me. I laugh, thinking of my Helsinki flat, 23C in the depth of a -20C winter. The first winter back in Scotland it was 15C in my living room with the heating on and suddenly there was a lot of baby poo in my life and no bum hose. Gone were wipe-clean surfaces, towels that dried overnight, underfloor heating, dish-drying cupboards and mixer taps (how do people wash their hands with a choice of scalding or freezing water?). Instead I got carpet, dusty, oily and filthy from outdoor shoes worn inside (shudder). There was even carpet in the kitchen, encrusted with years of unidentified sauce.
After weeks without a sauna (Finland has a sauna for every four people: a life necessity, not a luxury) I attempted to fight the chill by having a bath. Sitting in five inches of tepid water (no community heating or hot water system here), shivering, I stepped out onto my sodden, mouldy bathroom carpet, picked up my towel, still wet from the day before, clicked my ruby raw heels and wished for home. Home, where the coffee is always strong, warmth is not a luxury and the rain doesn’t fall up. There’s no place like it.
Homesickness vs host sickness
All these little annoyances may seem trivial, and to an extent I can laugh about them now, but that’s how culture shock creeps up on you: all the little things that just aren’t right, that make you miss where you came from. They sound petty when listed, but it’s little things that make up everyday life and everyday life is what makes up most of your actual life. Suddenly you realise your life is gone, your new friends are far away, routines are gone forever and you blame this loss on the lack of mixer taps rather than looking at the real reasons.
I went through a similar process when I moved to Finland. I got irrationally irritated by people using the phrase “today morning” instead of “this morning”, but the feelings of culture shock were not as intense because I was able to throw myself into a new life. I made an effort with living and assimilating that I hadn’t done since I first left my parental home.
Returning, however, there wasn’t the same energy. I felt I had left my life behind and returned to an older life, one I’d already lived, but it was all wrong, it was like finding an old, much-worn jacket that’s now faded and baggy round the stomach: it’s the same but you have changed. One American described the feeling as “going back to an old house. You know it was yours, but it doesn’t feel like it any more and just feels off”. Repatriation shock can feel like, or even bring about severe depression through an inability to assimilate. I lived constantly thinking of and wishing I was in Finland, a common experience that delays reassimilation for many. As one interviewee said: “While Facebook… helped me to stay in touch and cope it also hindered my reassimilation as I was still behaving as if I never left.”
You miss the little things in the way you miss the everyday things a loved one did before they died; you are essentially in a kind of mourning. Unlike the loved one, however, your host country still exists. You may have valid reasons for having come back “home” but you ache with longing because you know that everything is still as you left it in your host country. You could buy a plane ticket and you’d be there tomorrow.
Yet it’s much more than the little things. When people describe their feelings of culture shock it’s usually in terms of hating the weather or the biscuits or something else trivial: tangible things that irritate us with their “wrongness”. It’s much harder to find words for the bigger problem, the fact that you came home and home was there, but you aren’t the same you that left so it wasn’t your home any more. You aren’t even sure who you are any more.
Repatriation can be more challenging than moving abroad in the first place. Coming home can crush the life out of you and make you feel like you have walked back into a cage. While life was going forward for years, suddenly it feels like it has taken a giant step backwards. For me, living in Finland everything felt big, my horizons stretched out far into the distance and anything seemed possible. Returning home, everything seemed small and it felt like an end to living. I felt stuck, caught in a trap.
Fresh eyes
But why? Shouldn’t it be a relief to come home? Moving abroad is an adventure — you put all your energy into adjusting to your new life and making it home. When you come back to where you started from, you come back with new eyes that see everything differently. Eyes that see the flaws but don’t see the gloss of a shiny new technicolour adventure because everything is so familiar. Abroad, perhaps, you allowed yourself to live, to pour your energy into adapting to a new culture; anything seemed possible for me because I allowed it to be that way.
At “home” you might feel limited by others’ expectations that you slot straight back into your old life, or perhaps you limit yourself because you have certain expectations of what life should be like in your country of origin. Either way, you find it hard to fit the mould you or others have cast for you. Laura, a Finn who had lived in Scotland for six years and returned home, said: “I think I have finally assimilated, but there are still times when I feel somewhat “un-Finnish”. I don’t think I feel particularly Scottish, but I definitely feel less Finnish at times. However, I actually do feel homesick for Scotland.”
Moving abroad and making it work can make anything seem possible, making you feel free of limitations. I found I had to grow, learn and adapt in ways I hadn’t had to since leaving my parental home. As adults we are seldom pushed out of our comfort zones in the way we are as teenagers leaving home, but think of the energy and confidence that came with that first move.
It may be daunting moving abroad, but once you do it you realise that it’s a lot simpler than it seemed. People tell you that you are brave, or that it must be hard being so far from home, but you realise how little courage it actually takes, how easy it is and how small the world is. You feel free because you no longer fear change; the world is at your feet. Go anywhere in the world and the feeling is the same. Anywhere except returning “home”. When you come home, it’s over. Your adventure is over. It’s almost as if it never happened because no one at home shares your experiences. Sometimes you wonder, like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, if maybe you just dreamt it all.
When living abroad and feeling homesick you consoled yourself with thoughts of home, but coming back you realise that home isn’t home any more, nowhere is home. It hasn’t changed, but you have, and you will never fit in in the same way again. You can never go home again because the home you left belongs to a self that is gone. This is what leads to unexpected feelings of disassociation, alienation and depression. The difficulties of repatriation are often underestimated because of an expectation that coming home must be familiar; it must be a good thing.
It feels like a Facebook home with many rooms
Coming home, you feel limited again. You might try to fit in by being the person you were before you left, but that person was at home here, that person had a vague sense that there were other lives out there they could experience, other places, but was quite happy and content with the one that surrounded them. That person is gone. Your life, internal and external, has completely changed but it’s difficult to share those feelings when you return home without sounding a bore because, really, no one wants to know about your other life. Your concept of home completely changes once you return. As Laura put it: “(Home is) not defined by where my family is, or where I am from.” Another interviewee said: “I would say now the world just feels like a big Facebook home with many rooms.”
Reassimilation and how to cope
I still miss Finland and I probably will eventually move back, but at least for the time being I know I will be here and I have started to make my peace with that. The first step was returning to Finland on holiday to visit places and friends I’d left behind. Having done that, I can honestly say the biggest mistake I made was not saying goodbye. We had to pack up our lives after five years spent in the same home and leave in a matter of a few weeks. I didn’t have time to go to my favourite places or even to see most of my friends and say goodbye. Some I had to tell after I’d left.
I wasn’t at all mentally prepared for leaving and, while saying goodbye wouldn’t have prevented reverse culture shock, it might have softened the blow a little, allowed me to mentally and emotionally prepare for what was coming. Likewise another interviewee said: “(I) didn’t get to truly say goodbye or make things right. Coming back the shock was much greater, as I had not planned to return.”
Having said my goodbyes, belatedly, I have begun to make my peace with why I’d come back and reason through that it was the only choice I could have made, remembering all the positive things I had in my life because of that choice, not least of all being to be at home with my daughter. Keeping it clear in your head why you have moved back will be your lifeline when you start to float on a sea of despair. It will anchor you with the certainty that it is the only choice you could have made and you are in the best place you can be… for the time being.
After goodbye and why comes the merging of the two lives. The next step I made was to use what I’d learnt in Finland to make my life in Scotland a little more bearable, a little more like the things I liked about life in Finland. I started with the tangible. I got rid of the filthy carpets and put down wipe-clean cork flooring. I moved to a more modern, better insulated house where the living-room temperature dared to go above 15C. I bought a drying cupboard for dishes. I insisted that people remove their shoes when they came into my house. All small, trivial things, but now my house feels and looks more like the functional home I left behind and this winter has been more tolerable than the last.
You can’t fix your feelings by changing your floorings, but your external world is to a degree a reflection of your internal world. By changing small practical matters I also worked though my internal conflict: it’s useful to take the positive things about your experience and use them in your new life. Maybe you have gained confidence. One person I spoke to used to be a homebody, but their time abroad made them confident enough to travel and explore their home country in a way they never had before leaving. Some also spoke of gaining appreciation and acceptance for the differences between people and cultures, leading them to be much more understanding of people who were not brought up with the same social programming as themselves.
Now I’m looking for ways to make my “old life” seem new. I’m working on things I didn’t have the time for in Finland where my career took up most of my time, bringing new challenges into my life. I’m making the most of my surroundings and environment because there are many things I can do here I couldn’t do when I was away. I can’t say I’ve beaten the effects of reverse culture shock yet, but in the meantime I am trying not to just wait for the day I get to “go back home”, but to live a new life in an old land and build a new home, a home I can carry with me wherever I go.
Home isn’t where I left it in Scotland; this will never be home again in the way it used to be. But, while I still struggle with homesickness for Finland, home isn’t exactly there either: home has become internalised. I bring my home with me, I bring it in the way I live my life, in the way I set my house up and most importantly in the people I chose to live my life with: the little family I brought back with me from Finland. Maybe by this time next year we will be living in back Finland, maybe we won’t. It won’t matter because wherever we are I will take home with me and try not to pine for any geographical location. Just because the bus driver doesn’t play Dio doesn’t mean I can’t take an MP3 player with me and still listen to Dio on the bus.
Originally published at www.contributoria.com.
