A few years into living in Spain, I went home to California for a visit.
Jetlagged, mindlessly moving through a clothing store, I miscalculated the distance between myself and a woman at a rack. There was an entire aisle I could have taken. Instead, without consciously deciding to, I chose the path that grazed her shoulder — the roce, as I’d come to think of it, the Spanish instinct to take the route in closest proximity to someone even when the wider option is right there.
She whipped her head around to face me and in outrage practically shouted, “Excuuuuuuse meeee!!!”
I mumbled an apology four times at the floor and got out of there as fast as I could.
My nervous system toggle was faulty that day. My body had recalibrated to a country where personal space closes without apology, and it hadn’t checked whether the room it was standing in agreed.
Now, when someone gives me the roce on a Madrid sidewalk, I barely register it. Not because I stopped noticing. Because my nervous system stopped treating it as data worth flagging.
The baseline that moves in life abroad
That's the part nobody tells you before you decide to move abroad long-term — not that your nervous system will stay alert longer than it needs to, though it will. That it can also, eventually, forget what alert used to feel like as the default. The vigilance never fully resolved. But your baseline has moved along with your body.
This isn't just a feeling.