A 1-Way Ticket Home: Giving up the Digital Nomad & Traveler Life

I spent about six years roaming around the world, a dream of mine since I started studying French in middle school. After a trip to Colombia and Ecuador in 2013 gave me wanderlust like I hadn’t had in years, I decided to leave Chicago’s dreary winters and try to tap into the biggest advantage of a new digital working world: waking up anywhere I wanted to be that had WiFi.

It took a little time to secure something steady. I worked in Colombia in a remote village helping the school reform its English program through a local nonprofit. It didn’t pay much, but enough to live and travel around a part of Colombia most tourists never see, as well as the bits they blog heavily about. Finally, I got a remote job freelancing in my career field for a company that paid enough that I could live in cheap cities anywhere in the world — the kind of cities I would find more interesting anyway.

I bought a one-way ticket to Mexico to see what would happen and didn’t move back to the U.S. for almost five years.

It was one of the greatest adventures of my life, something I hadn’t expected to find in my 30s. I lived in Mexico, in Berlin (mostly), in Portugal, in Australia. I traveled extensively around Europe, through Asia. I visited home whenever I wanted; I visited friends wherever they were. I ended up settling in Berlin as my base for the most part, its relaxed work/life views, cheap economy, a new partner, and cheap flights to places around the globe appealing to me. I wasn’t 22 anymore either; a home base with a nice couch was sometimes as great as a market in Bali!

Eventually I transitioned to an office job in Berlin. With six weeks paid vacations and cheap flights to weekend destinations, I was still able to fold adventures into my routine. It also just felt “cool” to say I worked in Berlin. But something was starting to feel unsettling: I started daydreaming about being back in the U.S. I started to miss my family intensely and began to use a lot of my vacation time to visit them. The shiny luster of trips to Spain or Copenhagen started to wear off. By the summer of 2019, I knew I wanted to return home, my dream fulfilled but no longer fulfilling.

And so I returned. And I’m in the process of noting how it really feels to come back to your home country after years of traveling extensively. I read a lot about what to expect, preparing myself for the challenges that came along with the rewards, but it is that cliche that you can’t really know what it’s like until you experience it.

Regret

It’s a strange thing to daydream about something so badly and be super excited that you’ve put it into place, only to realize the day before your flight home that you suddenly regret your decision. It’s a shock, something you didn’t want to happen.

It happened to me. I realized my last night in Berlin that evenings in cozy bars with people from all over Europe and the world weren’t going to be part of my average week. I couldn’t just pop in to any one of Berlin’s queer bars and clubs that covered the spectrum of LGBTQI+ identities, something I struggle to find in the U.S. Speaking multiple languages in a day, going to Sicily if I felt like it because it was 50 euros round trip over the weekend, these things were gone. These were my loves; someone else’s would be different but the idea’s the same.

It’s to be expected I’ve decided — if you lived a certain life long enough, you must have loved parts of it (I hope!). Going home to get back to the things you missed means giving up those parts. I long for them a bit still, but the regret didn’t last. While I might have made a more solid plan of when/how to return, a different regret, I haven’t felt I made the wrong decision.

Restlessness

I spent six years making sure Kayak, Booking, Kiwi, Airbnb, GoEuro (now Omnio) and TripAdvisor never got underused. Google Maps was as essential to me as my email. I researched and mastered local classified listings for apartments in multiple countries. I learned how to find the best flight deals and be persistent in looking. Traveling on a budget meant every trip had to be researched obsessively.

If I ever need to work as a trip planner, I wouldn’t even need an orientation. Was it exhausting sometimes? Absolutely. Was it satisfying as hell? Always. There wasn’t a month that went by in the last six years where booking transportation and lodging wasn’t in the pipeline.

And now that I’m back in the Midwest, ready to be here for a while again, I have nothing in the pipeline, and I don’t know how to scratch that restless itch. I’m job searching heavily (see the bit about coming back without a plan), so that occupies a lot of my time. But I don’t have the excitement, the high, of that next jaunt off somewhere new, or somewhere old and beloved, to look forward to, to plan for.

You get addicted to that high, and there’s going to be some withdrawal when it’s gone!

Conflicting Before & After Thoughts

I can’t wait to be home and in my familiar culture for more than a visit; home is really boring and nothing seems to have ever changed.

I’m tired of this city of Peter Pan syndrome expats and the cold locals; I want to go back to the excitement of nights out until 8 a.m. and being the interesting foreigner.

I want to walk into a shop and speak English and converse in ways where I feel in control; I miss working on my German, Spanish, French, Portuguese.

I miss how friendly Americans can be; why do Americans talk so much and why is customer service here so in your face?

I’m going to start some great new life path at home now that I’ve evolved so much in my time abroad; what the hell am I going to do with my life?

It’s confusing, and probably symptomatic of people who like to travel. We always feel there’s a greener grass somewhere. Home didn’t evolve like we did, so the reality of being there is not going to match the nostalgic romance we created from homesickness and distance.

Loneliness

This is one I really didn’t expect; in fact, I expected the opposite. I went home to be near friends and family, the people who keep me from being lonely. Life as a digital nomad can be very solitary; you long for companionship and true connection. Living in a transient city like Berlin can make it tough to make a community of close friends who won’t leave at some point. That happened to me a lot.

But when you return home and begin to settle in, you realize just how long you have been away and how much of your life you didn’t share with people there. They have carried on with their lives and adjusted to you not being a fixture. You have years of memories that they simply have no relation to.

And so I’m finding myself feeling like I moved to a new city all over again, lonely even among the people I’ve known my whole life, or for years. It will pass, I have no doubt, just as it did when I stepped off the plane in dozens of places across the globe.

Feeling Trapped

You experienced a life that wasn’t office jobs and suburban living and two weeks vacation, a life dictated by someone else’s vision of stability and success. You made your existence your own, you were the master of your surroundings. You experienced cultures who view life, family, friends, social care, belongings, status and work in entirely new ways to how you were trained to view them, without even realizing it. These experiences fortified your resolve to never submit again to the cage of an ordinary or mundane existence.

But returning home and looking for work back in a culture that doesn’t operate on your “evolved” perspective can make you feel like you’ve put yourself back into that cage. American culture feels incredibly work and status oriented with little regard to vacations and leisure; the Midwest even more traditional in its views on what work should look like. But even if you’re returning to somewhere other than the U.S., you may still find that returning to the daily routine of work feels too ordinary, stifling even. If you worked in an office abroad, it could feel like an experiment.

Working at home is just, well… work.

Opportunity

But let’s end on a positive note. While there are a lot of unexpected emotions and challenges to returning home after years living overseas, there is a great deal of optimism to be found.

I remind myself daily that I succeeded in creating a joyful life that I always wanted to experience. I didn’t let obstacles — the naysayers, the uncertainty, the financial juggling — stop me from achieving it. I accomplished my goal and no one can ever take that away from me.

And if I did it once, I will do it again. The difficulties faced in returning home are the same in some sense as the ones you experience when you move away. The important thing to remind yourself is that a lot of the hard emotions will pass, and that figuring out how you want to shape your life back home is your new goal. Being home doesn’t mean giving up all travel; being home doesn’t mean having to resign yourself to the 9 to 5 grind. The digital working world is still yours to take advantage of.

And as many friends told me as I was preparing to come home, a decision that was entirely mine after all: “if it doesn’t work out, you can always come back!”