What Returning Home After Teaching Abroad Actually Feels Like
I often find that people talking online about teaching abroad talk about travelling to the country and the experience when there, and this is clearly very important! In fact, most posts of my own will fall into this category. However, equally as important is what happens when you leave?
Most people don’t plan to teach abroad forever. Although I met many people who planned to go for a year or two and never left!
Returning home after teaching abroad can include a concoction of emotions such as sadness, uncertainty and maybe even relief!
You will be back in a place with familiar food, familiar language and friends who understand your references. You will be surrounded by systems that make sense without explanation.
What’s less often discussed is that coming home can feel disorienting in its own way. Not in a dramatic sense, and not necessarily in a negative one. More in the sense that home is familiar, but you are not exactly the same. It is also likely that things at home have changed depending on how long you have been away for. 3 years for me meant that things had changed a lot! Especially the prices…
The expectation of seamless reintegration
There’s an assumption that once you return, everything will click back into place. In many cases, it does. I found that I slipped back into life relatively easily, but not perfectly by any stretch.
You’ll resume old routines. Conversations will feel easy. The context that once felt natural will feel natural again. Any difficulty you experienced abroad will dissolve in the comfort of the familiar.
You may find yourself noticing things you didn’t before. Norms that once felt neutral now stand out. Conversations that used to feel engaging may feel smaller or more repetitive. Or you may feel slightly out of sync, as though you’ve missed an update no one announced.
This the recalibration process ladies and gentlemen.
While you were away, you were learning how to function inside a new system and this took a lot of mental energy.
You were potentially navigating language differences, workplace expectations, and unfamiliar social norms. Even if the days felt ordinary at times, the background effort was significant.
When you return home, that effort disappears. Things are easier to interpret. But that doesn’t mean you immediately feel more at ease. You’ve spent months, sometimes years, adjusting outward. It can take time to adjust back inward.
When you’ve lived and worked somewhere that didn’t immediately make sense, everyday inconveniences at home can feel less urgent. You may find yourself more patient with uncertainty or more aware of how culturally specific certain assumptions are. I have found I am so much more culturally tolerant. This is a blessing!
At the same time, you may feel more frustrated when others talk about the world as though it is uniform and predictable, but remember to have patience with people.
Missing something you can’t easily explain
There is sometimes a particular kind of absence after returning.
It isn’t always the country itself that you miss. For me it was the people more than anything, including the students I taught. It might be that you will miss the intensity of learning, the feeling of navigating something larger than yourself, or the clarity that comes from being visibly outside your comfort zone.
Home is stable and more knowable but this can feel slightly boring in comparison to life you have been living away from home.
That contrast can be confusing. You chose to return. You may be glad to be back. And yet something feels quieter than you expected. Both of these reactions can coexist!
Returning home after teaching abroad is a process. The same way the early months abroad required patience, the early months back home often do too.
If you’re reading this before heading away and are still thinking through whether teaching abroad is right for you, the Start Here page outlines some of the broader patterns that shape the experience before, during, and after.
One of the more surprising aspects of returning home is realising that not everything resets.
You carry forward ways of thinking that developed elsewhere. You may be less certain, but more comfortable with that uncertainty. Less reactive. Slightly more attentive to context. Returning home doesn’t undo the experience. It integrates it, slowly, often without announcement. Being home for 6 months myself, I can say with certainty that I am still not the person I was when I left! And that’s not a bad thing.
I hope that if you do plan to return home soon, or have already, that these ideas and thoughts are useful.
