The first few months we were back in the States found me feeling almost overwhelmingly adrift. Every day I woke up expecting to finally feel settled. Each day that I woke up still feeling like my head was up in the clouds just added to my growing frustration. It didn't matter how organized our new place became, how many old faces or old haunts we revisited, I felt like I had forgotten how to live in the United Sates. There was a great disconnect of what I could only label as reverse culture shock.
Then one day I woke up and realized I felt normal--totally settled and in my element. Except I wasn't in my new apartment; I was in my childhood home...and I had been there for DAYS, feeling blessedly normal without realizing it. The relief of finding I still knew how to effortlessly be ME was overwhelming. It was around that time that I realized expecting to feel settled in Washington State was just silliness. So I stopped expecting that feeling to come...and things have felt a lot more peaceful ever since.
I've had to allow myself a lot of grace these past six months. I've made a lot of room for things to be less-than-perfect and we've all endured a lot of physical, emotional and spiritual stress, so where I'm at right now is taking a break from any expectations I had previously about how I would handle this part of our transition. I'm also shrugging off any notions anyone else might have about where we should be at this point. At the end of the day, this transition is nothing short of crazy. I can outwardly approach every day, walking the walk and talking the talk, but inside my brain is screaming that it's coo-coo-banana-crackers CRAZY that I have to stop myself from speaking to people at the Farmer's Market in German, or that I can't just walk out my door and find the veritable World at my feet. There are car seats and parking lots and lots of buckling and unbuckling in between. The EVERYTHING all at once is madness. And don't even get me started on walking into a place like Target. I think normal people feel like they're drowning when they enter those doors.
In the end, any time our experiences here or there come up, I think the thing we fail to get across is that there are pro's and con's to living abroad and to living in the United States. Period. They are different because they're different. Not because one is better than the other. Like anything else in life, it's what we make of our experiences that make them good or evil. And hands down, we loved Vienna. Vienna was good to us. We loved the city and we loved how we grew as individuals and as a family while we were there.
And that's another cog in the wheel: we've changed. Everyone else has changed too, for that matter. It can get weird, I think. But the only person I've got any kind of control over, when the fact becomes apparent, is myself. The solution I've come up with? "Well, that's ok then." I've learned to accept that a lot of people are beautiful because they're different from me and I hope that won't change any time soon.
Slowly by slowly, we're adjusting to being in the Tri-Cities. As for our future, we're leaving any ideas about how long we'll be here entirely open ended. It's surprisingly more comfortable to allow ourselves the range of six months to eternity rather than trying to take a stab at predicting the future. (although I'll admit to publicly regretting the fact I hadn't first consulted an astrologist when we booked our plane tickets back to the US) More than anything, wasting time fretting over guesswork would surely lead to madness.
Not to say it's easy leaving the big decisions up to the Universe; there are plenty of decisions we'd happily make for ourselves if we suddenly won the lottery and were free to do as we pleased. It's just that sometimes it's difficult to truly believe we've already won the lottery--that there's already a plan infinitely better than any we could devise--that no matter where we want to be and what we want to do, we are already being provided for in the best way possible. Plans have been made and our real job is to have faith--to cling to our Savior and say: "You are so good. You've got this. You've always had it. Even when I was a pathetic mess at the bottom of my barrel or when my emotions became so unraveled, I thought I could see them spilling out of me onto the floor... always, You were with me. And you were good".
I've got faith that the World will keep on keepin' on. That our little lives will keep rolling on as well. I know that if I ever find myself feeling settled in a place, it'll likely come as a total surprise. And that I've got no real answers to the questions people have for me. I imagine it'll all come out in the wash and some day I'll point back and say: See? There's your answer.
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