Holy crap.
It just hit me like a brick. I was at Mike's hanging with him and Jess, both whom I haven't seen in four months. All of a sudden I couldn't stop thinking about India. Literally everything was reminding me of India. And I wanted to tell people too. About the cows and the monkeys, about Neval McDrunkface, about Hinduism and religion. The visible reality of poverty and malnutrition. About all the marriage proposals. About the meals for a dollar. Everything.
It didn't hit me before now because I was so excited to be home. But whoa. I didn't understand the term "culture shock" before. Everything is completely different than it was three days ago. And it's never going to be that way again. I feel like I need to relearn U.S. culture and how to live in it. It comes in spurts. But when it comes, it's so obvious.
I wonder how long it will take to reintegrate myself into this place. I wonder how long I'll think about India at all the not-so-optimal social moments.
Damn. Has anyone ever experienced this?
2 comments:
To a smaller degree I had that this summer when I came back from the UK. Everything reminded me of London so much that I found it overwhelming to talk about and thus ended up not telling anyone anything about my time there. I haven't really blogged about it or posted pictures. This past week was the first time I started looking back at everything.
I think relearning US culture is a good thing: you'll look at things differently than you did when you left here--that's for sure!
Yes yes yes. I've experienced it in two ways. When I was younger we lived in Australia, and coming back from there was really weird because everyone here is so different. On another level though, I think what your going through is also a little more than culture shock. It's what happens when you spend so much time away from your real life, and instead everything is totally different. You've spent the past six months of your life enveloped in a different place with different people who you've probably become really close with and no one here gets that. You don't have to cross an ocean for that to happen. It happened to me when I came back from DC. It happens everytime I spend a lot of time with people and then don't see them for a long time. It's like the memories you had in some place and the people you shared it with are just gone, and even though your with other people you love now its incredibly painful and all you can think about is the place you've left but you can't talk about it because when you do its either too painful or you can hear people getting bored with you. It goes away. But not right away. And while you're waiting for it to pass, it really sucks.
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