Being back, I feel like an imposter in my own life. I've been gone for a year in Germany, been completely by myself, built relationships with new and good friends... alone without my home environment I knew finally where I ended and my environment began. I knew exactly who I was and why I did things, and I was satisfied with that. My friends there knew me as I was, as I presented myself, the complete me I finally felt comfortable expressing, and one new friend even had the uncanny ability to read me, my mind, my feelings, from the beginning, without having to study and know me for any amount of time... I can easily count on one hand the number of times that has happened in my life.
Now I'm back at home, where I grew up. For part of me it's like I never left, as if my year away were only a dream vividly remembered, chocked full of fantastic scenery and bizarre languages... the other part of me rails at being back, hate's it. I could list the many things that plague me, but it would solve nothing. It's as if there was a hole left in my home and life here when I departed, and returning, I find I don't fit into it neatly. I haven't changed so much, I'm very much the person that left, though I have become more completely me, myself, whilst away. It's like trying to sleep in a bed that's suddenly too small, I just can't seem to make my home life fit comfortably around me.
I'm worried that any minute someone is going to discover I'm not me. Actually, I'm more frightened I'm going to discover the person I thought I was, the person I was proud of being, the person that handled new and foreign with calm and poise, who relished the awkward situations, is a sham. I'm terrified of it. I fear the person I had finally decided I was and who I felt comfortable with was just an inflated form of me, inflated from the surroundings and culture I was absorbing, fake and bloated like a balloon and ever losing air now, or just ready to burst altogether. I don't know what I will/would do when/if that happens, when I'm finally deflated.
They tell us of Culture Shock, how it's hard to adjust being there, away, and how it's also difficult to readjust, to be at home when at home. I found the adjustment there quite easy, like slipping into a chair that's just the right size. Maybe it's the simple answer that everything I've studied, all the things I've learned about human civilization and from whence we come, was finally put into use... and being home now all this knowledge and the application of it is relegated to trivia and hypothetical situations once more. I don't feel the spark here, I don't feel daily like I'm succeeding in my life at something different and invigorating, that I'm unlocking secrets worth knowing as I go about my errands. Home feels like a trap, like I've been discovered somewhere I'm not supposed to be and have been deported back to my place of origin. I tell myself all the things that are supposed to comfort me, but they are daily less effective, a pain-pill I'm building a resistance to.