I don’t know why I started arguing with airport security. It was stupid and irrational. But I wasn’t in a space to be rational. I had just traveled 36 hours from Karachi, Pakistan and had landed in New York City’s John F. Kennedy Airport. The warmth and developing world chaos of Karachi contrasted with New York’s crowds and control, and I was once again the proverbial square peg in a round hole.
It was an icy reentry into an already cold season.
I somehow made it through the nasty interaction that ensued and sank into my airport chair, my face burning with embarrassment, chagrin, and pure pain. I didn’t belong in this world. I knew it with every fiber of who I was. But this is where my legal address lived and for the time I needed to accept that.
I’ve done a lot of “reentering”. Reentering is when you’ve lived for an extensive time away from your passport country and you are entering back into the world where your legal address is housed.
Reentry is tricky. It’s uncomfortable and scratchy. It wears like an ill-fitting coat, enveloping and smothering what’s inside. It comes with a peculiar loneliness and can breed nasty bouts of self-pity. And the discomfort is usually in proportion to how long you’ve been away.
It’s one thing to go on a semester abroad; it’s entirely another to live in a place for 15 years and then reenter. While the reentry difficulties a college student feels are absolutely valid, the reentry of the other is more generally more pronounced and lasts longer.
The word reentry began in the criminal justice system. The thought was that criminal offenders who had been in the prison system needed help to transition back to life outside the system, ‘normal’ life. A study done in the U.S in 2006 found that two-thirds of the offenders released from the system would end up rearrested within three years time. Reentry programs are designed to break the cycle of release and re-incarceration with the hope of healthy and permanent transition into society. Effective reentry programs help the person develop the life skills necessary to become healthy, productive members of society.
Reentry for the expat and global nomad is a bit different. The main issue is feeling like an outsider, a foreigner, in a place where you think you’re supposed to belong. The reality is the lens through which you view the world has changed. The world you left has changed, even if it’s initially not apparent, and you have changed. Just like a new pair of glasses has you initially tripping and spinning, so does reentry.
Feelings of disorientation, confusion, frustration, and anxiety are a few of the feelings that can arise while negotiating reentry.
While there are profound differences between reentry as defined by the criminal justice system and reentry as defined by the expat or global nomad, the end goal is similar — that of healthy transition into society.
So what is healthy transition into society? And how do we do it when our world is spinning and our hearts feel exiled?
The standard response to that question is to talk about stages of reentry, and indeed there are stages. Stage one, often called disengagement, begins before we’ve left. This is where we go through the tasks, both physical and emotional, of leaving, of packing up and saying goodbye. Stage two, euphoria, puts us in a honeymoon stage; a time where we’re so excited to be with family who we’ve missed, eat foods that we’ve fantasized and longed for, do things that we couldn’t while away. This is a remarkable time. Stage three, called alienation for good reason, takes us where we don’t want to go — reverse culture shock, disliking what we see in our passport country, angry at the ‘norms’ that we never thought about before we left, frustrated at our families and friends for not ‘getting it’, displaced and exiled. And then we go to stage four, gradual readjustment the experts call it, that stage where we integrate back into a new normal, taking that which we’ve learned and making it a part of us, even as we accept that we have returned.
And if we were robots, those stages would make perfect sense. They would flow one into the other on a smooth trajectory. We would look in the mirror and say “Don’t worry — you’re just in that stage 3. Soon everything will be better.” But we’re not robots and this is anything but a smooth process for many. So beyond the stages what do we need.
I think we need a few things.
1. First, I don’t think we can underestimate the power of leaving at peace. If at all possible, leave at peace with your colleagues, your friends, your church and community, and your adopted homeland. Sure – there were hard things, but if we leave at peace, we can start in peace. This is huge and I’ve never heard anyone stress how important it is.
2. Recognize that there is no way we can do this alone. Just as an addict recognizes that they must have a ‘higher power’, so it is with us — we need help in this process. Whether that be a friend or counselor, it’s too hard to do it alone. Yes – God is there and he is ever-present, and sometimes it helps when he has skin on.
3. Find ways to tell your story. This may be to a person or it may be in a journal, but tell it. It is uniquely yours, it is critical to who you have become. This was one of the reasons I began blogging — I had to have a venue for stories, for things I saw, felt, heard. Tell your story and tell it loud.
4. Eat well and exercise. This is critical and again, I rarely hear it addressed. The tendency can be to put on weight, in my case, a lot of weight.The food is completely different. We would laugh and say that one piece of chicken in the United States would serve our whole family. This is an emotional roller coaster and not only do we feel at odds with our surroundings, we’re at odds with our bodies as well. Eating a healthy diet, making sure we have protein and Vitamin C (our healers), and coupling it with exercise, even if it’s minimal, can get our bodies out of the reentry slump. Exercise brings out our endorphins and we will physically feel more able, stronger.
5. If you can, find a restaurant that serves the food you’ve left behind in your adopted country. While it seems really simple, the familiarity of smells and tastes can kill the saudade, if only for a while. If you can’t find a restaurant in your area, set aside one day of the week to cook foods from your adopted country. Your whole family is at different stages of adjustment to their new surroundings, so it will benefit all of you. Use it as a time to reminisce, and then move forward.
6. Use precious items from the country(ies) you love, but have left, to decorate your home. Don’t buy in to the latest and greatest from Home Goods! You have Unique, You have Amazing, You have Beautiful. Meld it into your style and display things that are beloved and familiar.
7. Learn to grieve well. I’ve written more in a post by the same title. If you’ve not read it take a look and feel free to add to it in the comments. Grieving is something that we often don’t allow ourselves to do – and yet it is so crucial to being able to move on. To name our losses, to grieve them, allows us to move forward in a more realistic and healthy way.
8. Pick your safe people. Everyone isn’t safe. Pray for discernment that you will know who to share with and who not to. This is a huge mistake I’ve made, assuming all will get it. There are those who, despite good intentions, will make you feel worse. These are the “Pull up your bootstraps and get on with it” folks. While there is a time when putting on boots, and pulling up those clichéd bootstraps is necessary, there’s also a time when you have no boots on. First you have to get the boots — only then can you use them effectively. We are created for community, created to ‘belong’. And some of our struggles with reentry are feeling that our place is taken away. Finding safe people is a step towards ‘belonging’. We may still feel like our outside world is alien, but inside with that safe friend, drinking tea, crying, laughing, and getting powdered sugar on our upper lips from pastries – we belong.
Negotiating reentry can be as simple as a few weeks and as complicated as seven years. Know that others are in this journey with you and for you.
Readers, what would you add to the list? Please connect with the piece through the comment section below!
Blogger’s Note: While some of this applies to the third culture kid, there are also some crucial differences – for they are not usually “reentering”. They are “entering”. The TCK has spent so little time in their passport country that it’s a misnomer to call their moving to their passport country “Reentry”.
Perhaps this is where some of the difficulty arises. Parents are ‘reentering’, their kids are not. The dynamic is different and needs a different approach. I’ll tackle that next!
