This summer, I went back to my hometown for the first time since moving to German with my family three years ago.

I visited my old apartment, took a stroll in the park I used to walk in pretty often back then, and I met all my family and friends. It felt like we only saw each other yesterday. It felt wonderful. And at the same time…strange. Like I was out of place there.

I visited familiar places that haven’t changed a bit. Life goes on there, with or without us. Our friends are having kids, buying homes, and having game nights together, but we don’t belong to this life anymore no matter how much we’d love to; no matter how often we see them via video calls. It makes sense — what else did I expect? Honestly, nothing. Being abroad, I didn’t even think about it much. But being back, the realization just hit me and I started to question our decision to move abroad. Was it really the best for us? How would our lives be if we'd stayed? 

Suddenly, you feel like an alien between two worlds — not at home yet in your new country, and not quite belonging in your country of origin either. 

And it’s weird. Why don’t I feel at home in the place where I was born and lived for 30 years of my life? I have the same cultural background as everybody else. I know all the unspoken rules. And yet, I’m like a square peg trying to squeeze itself in the round hole. The answer is probably that while this old life didn’t change much over the past three years, we changed a lot. We fought bureaucracy, learned to deal with everyday problems in a foreign language, and basically started our life all over from scratch.

This trip home was an emotional rollercoaster, but also made me reassess and value the experience we went through here, in Germany. And also it taught me, thanks to Dr. ChatGPT, that these are the signs of reverse culture shock. I had naively thought it would manifest itself in some smaller day-to-day things, like noticing people back home not sorting their trash or not smiling at you. 

So if you ever feel the same way when you go back — a stranger in the most familiar place — know that nothing is wrong with you. It’s just change showing itself in disguise. We don’t always notice how much we’ve grown until we look at our old life from the outside. And that’s okay.