Coming Home Isn't Landing. It's Starting Over.

Everyone prepares you for the hard part of moving abroad. There are whole books, subreddits, group chats, YouTube videos, and influencer stories built around exactly one fear: landing somewhere new, not knowing the language, not knowing where anything is, or maybe not even knowing anyone, and no one knowing you. Here's what nobody prepares you for: that's not the hard part of moving abroad, living abroad. It never was. The hard part is the flight back. Not the flight leaving home, but the flight that returns you home. I'm Kiara and this is Put the Guidebook Down.

Two episodes ago, I told you that you don't need to find yourself abroad, because you build one. New place, no scaffolding, nobody around who already decided who you were and held you to that. That's the part most of us get. It's the part people actually talk about, and why you hear "you find yourself abroad" in all the media and travel-related merchandise.

What nobody talks about is what happens when that built self comes home to a bed that isn't a hostel bunk. By every logical measure, home should be the recovery, not the relapse, and most certainly not the stressful part of the journey. Except that's not what the research says, and it's not what actually happens to most people who've lived somewhere else long enough to change. Coming home doesn't feel like landing. It feels like starting over, except this time nobody around you thinks you need to. And you feel like that moment when a child is trying to stick a circle peg into a square peg and it's just not working. It just doesn't feel right. Home doesn't feel like it used to, because you've changed while the rest of your home environment has stood still, in a way.

That gap between what reentry should feel like and what it actually feels like has a name, and it's been documented since the 1960s. It's just never part of the story anyone tells you before you book the flight, study abroad, or start a new program. So let's change that, starting with why coming home is actually a second dip, and not the finish line.

There's a model in cross-cultural psychology called the U-curve, and it describes the shape of adjusting to a new culture. You land, you're excited, that's the high point. Then reality sets in: the paperwork, the loneliness, the days where nothing makes sense. Essentially the hype from the trip begins to fade and you start to crave something new, or a change, and you move on. Then slowly you climb back out of that pit and you adjust. That's the U-shape.

In 1963, researchers John and Jeanne Gullahorn looked at what happens after that U closes, when people actually go home, and found the shape doesn't stop there. It happens again: a second excitement, a second dip, arguably a harder one, on the way back in. And that second dip is the part nobody plans for, because on paper it shouldn't exist. You're not adjusting to somewhere unfamiliar. You're going back to the place you're supposedly from and already super familiar with.

But a researcher named Werkman, who spent years studying Americans returning from living overseas, found something that should stop you in your tracks, make you pause, make you think. People who had lived abroad consistently said that leaving home and figuring out an entirely new country was less stressful than the jolt of coming back into their own home and daily lives. Let's rewind and listen to that again: building a life from nothing, in a language you didn't grow up speaking, or maybe don't even know, was rated as easier than unpacking a suitcase.

You may be thinking, have I experienced this? What is she talking about? Let me explain. I've had this feeling. My friends and colleagues have had this feeling. We've actually talked about this feeling on this show several episodes ago, but at the time we called it reverse culture shock — that's the term a program admin actually used to explain this to me. In a way, it's kind of right, because it is to some degree reverse culture shock: you're adjusting to cultural differences, relearning habits and routines. But it's not the entire explanation of what's actually happening. It's just another part of the W-curve.

I experienced this W-curve myself. It was exciting to come back home, to see my family and close friends again in person, to be in my own bed after backpacking and staying in hostels with not the best conditions, let's face it. So you're excited in this phase, because everyone else is excited to have you back and wants to hear all about your trip. But then the hype dies down. The excitement people around you felt about having you back fades, and you start re-entering your routine, except you don't fit into that routine in exactly the same way you had before. You're looking for that feeling of excitement again, reflecting on how you felt during your time abroad and feeling the need to get back to it. You're chasing that feeling, and just feeling like that circle peg in a square hole again.

So why can home feel like belonging nowhere at times? The W-curve tells you the shape of the dip. It doesn't tell you what's actually happening inside it. For that, there's a term from a researcher with a name I'm definitely going to mispronounce, Çiğdem Kağıtçıbaşı, who studies cross-cultural adaptation: deculturation. It's not homesickness, and it's not just being out of practice. Deculturation is the specific state of having partially lost the automatic fluency you used to have in your own culture, the unwritten rules, the small talk, the rhythms, what counts as normal, without having fully swapped in the fluency of the place you just left either. You're not fully of the place you came back to, and you're not still of the place you left. For a while, you're not fluent in either one, and you're kind of in this weird in-between, with mismatched pieces of each culture, trying to piece the parts of your culture together with the culture you began to immerse in and adapt aspects of while abroad.

And that's what makes it so disorienting to come back home. Nobody expects to feel like a foreigner in the grocery store they grew up going to. You expect that friction abroad, you've braced for it, you've mentally prepared for it. You have no scaffolding for feeling like a stranger in your own kitchen. That's the discomfort, that's the disorientation. This relates more to reverse culture shock, in that you're relearning and trying to find a way to bridge who you were before you left with who you became abroad, merging both parts into essentially a blend of all of it. And it's complicated to navigate internally, especially if you don't have anyone who can relate to this feeling. So you're just wondering, is it just me? And if you don't feel some internal tension or complication when you're moving back home and readjusting, I'm going to challenge that and say you probably didn't really immerse fully into the place you were.

For me, this has been expressed internally and externally in different ways. In a more funny story, I was talking out loud in a retail store, not long after coming back from living in Indonesia, about a moment where I'd had some stomach illness abroad, sharing details of the experience out loud. At the end, I realized the majority of the people around me spoke English, because I was back in the States, and could actually understand what I was saying, whereas before I was used to being able to get away with speaking English because people generally couldn't understand what I was saying, and could then tell embarrassing stories anywhere. So it was kind of a funny reality check.

But on a more serious note, this deculturation was felt in how I greet people, the rules of small talk, and the societal norms I'd adopted from my host communities that didn't fit with the American status quo. At one point I remember thinking, wow, we are very loud and direct with how we address people in American culture, whereas in Indonesia I was always addressing people with proper titles, avoiding conflict in public, and being really careful and respectful with how I approached conversations and vocabulary.

And this all leads into the question of why the hardest part isn't the feeling itself, but what you do once you're aware of what this feeling is. In 2000, a researcher named Kevin Gaw studied college students who had just come back from time abroad and measured something specific: how much reverse culture shock they reported, and what happened to them because of it. Students with higher reverse culture shock reported more personal adjustment problems and more shyness — that part isn't surprising. Here's the part that should sound familiar if you caught my episode "Nobody Knew My Name": those same students, the ones struggling most, were less likely to reach out for help. Not more, less. That's the self-isolation response again, the same coping pattern that showed up when a disrupted sense of self hit during the trip, showing up a second time, but on the way back in.

The exception is that this time it's quieter, because nobody around you thinks you need checking in. You're home, you're supposed to be fine. The people who might have noticed when you were struggling abroad, your support network, knew you were somewhere else and adjusting, which might be difficult. The people around you now, maybe that same support network, just see someone back from a nice trip, three weeks late on unpacking. They have no reason to ask, are you okay? Because of course you're okay, you're home.

But when you put these three things together, here's what they explain that no single one does alone: the shape of the dip from the W-curve, what's actually happening inside it, the deculturation, and why it goes largely unaddressed even though it's measurable and documented, via Gaw. Reentry isn't a mood. It's a second identity threat, and it runs on the same isolation instinct as the first one, just aimed at a room that has no idea anything happened.

So let's get deep and reflect here a little. If the version of you abroad was something you built, and reentry is this documented second, harder dip, whose fault is that dip, really? The easy answer is that you changed and you just have to get used to being back, get through reentry. I don't think that's right, and it's something I've been told numerous times, but it's not the whole explanation. Here's what's actually happening: you come home changed. The room didn't. Your coworkers still expect the same person who left. Your family had a role for you that got set before the trip, and maybe your whole life, and it never got updated even though you had. Nobody around you sat through the construal distance, the self-expansion, any of the actual mechanisms you experienced. They just see you, apparently the same, and that's not their fault.

The gap between who you became and who everyone around you is still addressing is where the second identity threat actually lives. It's not dramatic, it doesn't happen in an instant. It happens three weeks later, when someone asks how the trip was for the fifth time and the real answer doesn't fit anywhere in the question. And again, I'm not pointing fingers at anyone about whose fault it is that you might be feeling this way, or that no one's realizing this is a feeling, because as a society we just don't talk about this. Maybe because we don't know, maybe it's taboo, maybe we just need to do a better job, and that's what this show is about.

So I'm not going to tell you that time fixes this. I personally relate to and feel very deeply about this subject, so let's go a little deeper into these last few points. Think about what would have to change, at home and in you, for that person you became somewhere else to actually survive coming back. Something changed. What would you need to do to stop pretending it didn't? And how can we effectively merge these different aspects of ourselves when coming back, this new version we built, with the shell we left behind? Because leaving was never the hard part. Nobody warns you about the part after the airport the second time, when coming home. I'm Kiara. This is Put the Guidebook Down. Guidebooks tell you where to go. We're here for why you went. I'll see you in the next one. Bye!