You’re at the supermarket in your hometown. It’s the one you went to a hundred times before you moved abroad.
You know exactly where the fresh produce is. You know the shape and width of the aisles, as you wander up and down. The fluorescent lights overhead buzz at a familiar frequency. Everything is frozen in time, exactly the way you remember it.
Yet for all its familiarity… you’re not-quite-settled.
You’re moving through the space correctly, but you feel slightly out of step. As if you were observing yourself moving up and down the aisles of your memory while living the experience in the present. As if you were watching yourself performing a routine you used to do without thinking.
The place recognizes you. You don’t quite recognize yourself within it.
When the place is the same, but you aren’t
This is what return disorientation feels like. Achingly familiar to those of us who’ve lived abroad, or outside of our “home” context, for many years.
It’s not the disorientation that most people write about. It’s not the kind where everything around you has changed and you’re struggling to keep up, navigating a cultural rulebook you’re unfamiliar with — you know how to navigate that. This is the other kind: the disorientation where everything stayed the same, and you didn’t.
A return “home” leads to a kind of disorientation that most people don’t write about. The kind where everything stayed the same, and you didn’t.