What EAP Didn’t Mention…

(Or not to me at least).

This blog is for all of you out there, dredging through your last quarter in Santa Barbara for a semester, or maybe even for a whole year.  This blog is for everyone who is excited/nervous/anxious/yet looking forward to their time abroad, and just can’t wait to leave.  At this point, you all have surely been to your EAP pre-departure meetings and have heard a great deal about what is to come.  You may be feeling varying levels of preparedness, and are continuing to research the new country and home that will be yours for a few months.  In short, you are just ready to get on that plane and get the hell out of the United States.  While you may be tired of EAP alumni preaching at you about their experiences, I would like to offer you all some advice about a very important subject that I feel EAP grossly neglected, and that I sincerely wish someone had preached at me about during one of those meetings before I left.

While I felt incredibly well informed about things like the academic environment in Spain, cultural differences, and what to expect in my living situation, nobody discussed in any detail one very important aspect of the EAP experience: coming home.  You all may be thinking, “aren’t you currently abroad?” Yes, I am currently abroad, but I came home for about a month in between my Spain program and my Australia program, and what I experienced during that time was nothing like I could have expected.

I will first say that studying abroad is obviously a very temporary thing, but for however many months you are away, you build a life completely different than any you have ever known before.  For 3, 4, 5 months, or for you lucky people out there, for a year, you create a new world for yourself where you take on new challenges, perhaps learn a new language, and meet people that have an impact on you.  You travel, encounter new cultures, and have unforgettable experiences regularly.  You may fall deeply in love with the place you live (or with someone!), feel a sense of joy and purpose abroad that you have never known at home, and you may realize that you wish you could stay longer.  At some point, it hits you that your life has changed in a way you were never able to imagine before.  It all feels amazing and surreal and slightly dreamlike.

All that is good and well until you step on that plane to go home, and if you’re like me, realize that nobody told you that it was going to be harder to come back home than to leave.

I’ll put a disclaimer on this and say that this was just my experience.  I can’t speak for every single person who has gone abroad, but a lot of people I have talked to have felt similarly.  Anyway, as I was coming back home from Spain, I spent pretty much my entire journey (5 hour bus ride, then 15 hours total flying) in various stages of distress, alternating between just feeling numb and bawling.  When I arrived at SFO (without my luggage, thanks British Airways!), my parents picked me up and took me home.  The sight of my house in all its familiarity was incredibly jarring.  I was dazed, physically exhausted, and emotionally drained as I ate my first burrito in over four months before passing out in my bed.  The next morning, I woke up at 5:30 A.M., wide awake and in an absolute panic.  In the darkness, I literally could not figure out where I was.  I racked my brain going through some of the places that I had recently been before coming to the senseless conclusion that I was somehow in my own bed again.

The days that followed were a very strange blur, as I battled jetlag, and tried to piece together how it was that I had found myself at home again after doing things like drinking tea with Berber people in Morocco, watching Spanish TV with my host mom every day, and seeing flamenco on a regular basis.  It seemed strange to me that, after all that, after what seemed like just a few hours of traveling, I was torn away from a place that I had grown to love with all my heart, and people that I had started to feel similarly about.  I spent that month at home in a sort of disoriented, disjointed fog, trying to place myself back into a reality I had all but forgotten.  Everyone asked me how my trip had been, and I realized that the few superficial words that I could say about it really said nothing at all about what it was like, or what had happened to me.  Plus, nobody who has not studied abroad can really identify with any of the things that had been my reality.  That was incredibly isolating for me, and I felt a profound sense of deceit.  Surely somebody should have mentioned that it would be difficult to come home?

The truth is, nobody ever impressed upon me the fact that I would need to decompress from my experiences, that it would take some time to start making sense of what had just happened to me, or that I would feel distant from my friends and family for awhile.  I was completely caught off guard that I was experiencing reverse culture shock, which is incredibly real, or that I would feel like a foreigner in the place I had grown up in.  I was even more caught off guard that I was missing Spain with an intensity I couldn’t comprehend.  I am here to tell you all that this is normal.  As my dad put it to me, you experience quite a lot in a relatively short amount of time.  You are effectively shot out of a cannon, caught up in a hurricane of rapid change, and you need time to become centered again.  You need time to process what can seem as unreal as an incredibly vivid dream.

My advice to all of you future EAP participants, as well as to those of you who are nearing the end of your programs, is to just take it one day at a time when you get back.  Don’t have too many expectations and know that it will take awhile to get back to “normal,” even though you can never truly go back to your old normal.  Talk with friends from your program.  Try and maintain the friendships you created abroad.  Tell your family how you’re feeling, even if they don’t understand.  Keep a journal.  Cry.  Laugh.  Feel it all.  But most importantly, know you’re not alone and take everything you’ve learned and apply it in your life because studying abroad is an amazing gift.

Keep the fortitude everyone.

2 Responses to “What EAP Didn’t Mention…”

1. Paul Rivas says:

   May 24, 2010 at 10:00 am

   Hi Danielle, thanks for another good piece!

   I tell all my students that going is the easy part and coming back is a million times more difficult – I’m surprised you never heard me say it. We’ve done programs to deal with this when students return, but they were always poorly attended.

   I’ll warn you now though that it never gets easier. I’ve been away twice for six months and once for two years and coming back gets harder every time.

   Keep writing!
2. Jessica Walters says:

   March 25, 2012 at 7:42 pm

   Hi Danielle,

   I’m friends with Kaitlin Danssaert, and she showed me your blog because I am interested in teaching in Spain for a year. We work together at an elementary school in Oakland, and she thought I might like the same program you did. I was wondering if you would mind sharing that with me, and any advice or things I should know?

   Also, even though I only read a little of your blog, I really enjoyed it. I studied abroad in Italy for a semester, and it was REALLY hard coming back! Even though I didn’t think of it as culture shock, I suppose it was I feel like you wrote about it really well. Anyway, thanks for any information you can give me, and talk to you soon!

   Jessica