Back home

I’ve been taking some time off of Instagram and the blog lately. I want to say sorry but I feel like that’s wrong. I shouldn’t be sorry for being too busy with living my life to be on social media. So NOT SORRY!

Hm, where do I start now? With how it is to come back home? Well, it *is* not anymore because it’s 2,5 months ago that I came back home. So with how it was? Probably best. Because I want to keep it chronologically.

Together

The story of coming home starts even before I came back. It already starts in Iceland.
Because I met my mother there. I didn’t realize it before how much my mother is part of “home“. In the plane to Iceland I had this moment where I realize that I had never before been separated from my mum for so long. And these few words came into my head: “When did that happen?“ When did it happen that I grew from the little girl wich is always with her mum into who I am now, into a girl/young woman traveling the world by herself, being independent and not needing her mother anymore? When did that happen?
These moments are weird, aren’t they, where we realize how time has flown by and things have changed without us noticing it. They give me a little glimpse of how life plays. How it went, how it goes and how it will always go. What life does with the creatures on this planet and how we try to manage our lifes in this world.

However, when I met her it was more like we hadn’t seen each other for 3 weeks. Not 9 months. Still very familiar.
At first I thought it is normal and it’s like nothing has changed during the year and so on but then I started to feel how I have to get used to it again. Not only being with my mum again, but also being back in Europe. It’s incredible how much I felt to be “back home“ even though I wasn’t back in my home country yet. But it was Europe and I recognized all the things that are typical for Europe. I can’t name them anymore because it’s too long ago now but also because it’s often more of a feeling than that it is a fact or a thing.

This is definitely what the journey has brought me. That I see more what is special about home. Meaning if someone asks you what is special about your life normally you’d say nothing because everything is normal from your perspective. But for them it’s not and now I feel like it’s easier for me too see these things that account for my normal.

The biggest change now was that I wasn’t alone anymore. I don’t really know how to describe it but there is a difference between being around others, living with them (like with the people I stayed with over the year) and being together with someone. (not together like a couple, together like ... I don’t know. Just together.) In Iceland I was together with my mum. Not I was there, she was there, we were there together. I guess it is normal that this togetherness, this connection is the strongest between a child and her (or his) mother. But for me it was such a big change in that moment. Such a contrast. I really had to get used to that. Sitting in the car and before we leave it and go to visit a sight she would ask “What do we take with us now?“. Instead of thinking about what she needs and I think about what I need. It’s a totally different energy. And I was so not used to that anymore. And I think I liked this freedom of being alone. Being my own person.
At first I felt like I have to fight that, it felt so sticky, like I can’t move within that, like there is no space to breath anymore. But with the time it got better. I guess my mum understood that I need more freedom and tried to give it to me, I accepted and allowed the connection a bit more and I simply got used to it again.

So what happened first in the process of coming home?
1: I realized how much my perception of my old “normal“ has changed
And 2: I lost the freedom I had earned and lived with on the journey.

Both of these things continued in Germany.
The actual return in the airport in Hamburg was quite overwhelming for me. And not in a positive way. I didn’t know how to deal with the fact that I’m back home, that the Aufbruch is completely over now. I wanted to experience it alone, like I had experienced the beginning alone and all the smaller or bigger stops. But now I wasn’t alone and that kind of stressed me. Didn’t give me the space I needed.
It was all a bit much at once, all the bright advertisements, all the stores, all the people. And all of a sudden everyone spoke in German again. That was so weird for me that I placed myself next to American passengers of our flight while waiting for my luggage. To hear their voices talking in English. Seriously.

Just like before

When I was 10 years old my family moved. We stayed in the same town but we moved to another area. When I went back to that house once, it was so weird to see it all. It looked so familiar, but at the same time so different to how I had kept it in my memory. And after I experienced that I saw Europe with different eyes now I expected it to be the same with my home town and home.
But it wasn’t.... seeing my dad, come back on our property, back into our house, into my room, it was more like I had been gone for 3 weeks, not almost 10 months now.
Same with seeing all my friends again. A few minutes of reunion excitement but then it was like it was before.
At first I was relieved. I had feared that a year would be such a long time that things have changed so much, in different ways for them and for me, that I don’t fit in here anymore. I was relieved that I still felt like I knew the house, I was relieved that I still like my friends and I was relieved that they still like me. I really really liked my life before so at first I was happy to have it back. Exactly like I had left it.

But then another side of this came to my awareness: so much was like before, it almost was, as if I had never been gone. It almost was as if all the things I experienced during the year had never happened.
This thought really shocked me. Because that would mean the whole journey was for nothing.
I got stuck a bit in this thought. I didn’t know how to get out of it, how to proof it wrong, how to turn it around or how to find the positive in it.