Home, But Still Arriving

In this final post in my series on international transitions I share my personal take on what to do with an experience that reshaped you when there's no job waiting to help you make sense of it.

The Hardest Adjustment Wasn’t What I Expected

Of all the adjustments we made when we returned to the US, the hardest one for me was the restaurants. This was not completely unexpected. On a visit to New York City a year or so before we moved back, I snapped at a waitress when she came to the table a third time to take our appetizer order. “For the love of God, give us a minute to look at the menu!” Not my proudest moment. But after several years of European style service - professional, non-intrusive, borderline neglectful - the perky friendliness of American waitstaff grated. Whether it was a corner cafe or an upscale restaurant, I wanted to be mostly left in peace. In Amsterdam, where waitstaff are paid a living wage and don’t rely on tips and table turnover, we could linger at a canal-side table for hours, undisturbed. In contrast, being rushed out of an American restaurant made me frustrated and resentful.

Home, But Not Settled

I shouldn’t have been surprised by my difficulties readjusting after living abroad. Much like the polychallenge of moving abroad that I discussed in an earlier post, arriving home brings its own set of challenges. Moving back to the Boston area wasn’t a seamless process. I mourned the loss of my trusty “grandma bike” (the upright one-speed Dutch cruiser everyone rides) and the ease of cycling everywhere. Sitting in traffic made me crazy. The grocery store overwhelmed me: why do we need so many kinds of cereal? And on a personal level, I had a lot of catching up to do with family and friends, after missing out on several years of their lives.

Returning to a Search, Not a Job

My own transition was further complicated by the fact that I wasn’t returning to a job, but rather to a job search. For some international professionals, their company sends them abroad and then welcomes them back to the home office when their assignment is done. The familiarity of an American workplace can help returning expats re-establish their professional identity. The organizational structure gives them something to re-integrate into; they can test out new ideas or values within existing hierarchies and decide what to keep and what to let go of.

Making Myself Smaller

Without an employer or organizational structure to fit back into, I found myself trying to rebuild my professional identity in a way that would integrate what I had come to value: directness, global perspective, flat management, curiosity. From a job transition perspective, it was hard to frame my international experience in a way that made sense to recruiters. I didn’t want it to look like a blip in my resume, a fun few years of adventure in Amsterdam. So I learned to minimize some aspects of my time abroad. I talked less about cultural humility and expanded perspective, and spoke more about impact and accomplishments. I often felt like I was taking something that had made my life more expansive and trying to make it as small as possible, just to make people less confused. This experience of shrinking myself for others made it even more important for me to determine what I wanted to hold on to. 

What I Never Stopped Doing

We left the Netherlands seven years ago and I still hesitate before starting a sentence with “When we lived in Amsterdam…” I don’t ever want to be seen as someone who is stuck in the past. But over time I’ve found that I don’t need to preface statements with an explanation of our time abroad, because some of the things we did “when we lived in Amsterdam” have just become things we do. I wear orange on King’s Day and root for the Dutch in most sporting events. I say good evening to the whole room when I leave a restaurant. And I sometimes still say “eet smakelijk” before starting a meal. These small things remind me that I can maintain connections with a culture that I value. I haven’t fully solved how to integrate my expat experience in my professional life, but I’ve made peace with holding on to some quiet customs that are just for me.

Is there something that you quietly kept from a formative experience, without needing anyone else to recognize or validate it?