Re-entry anxiety: shopping

I started this post months ago, but was reminded to finish it after going to Wal-Mart with some friends of ours who recently moved back to the States from Nicaragua. I’ve updated it to more accurately describe my current feelings.

Having been back in the States for nearly a year now, I like to think the most intense emotions of reentry shock are behind us, but we still experience them from time to time—and likely will for years. Living in a different country inevitably changes you. Actually, I would go so far as to say that if living in another country has no effect on your perspectives or practices, you may be unhealthily inflexible. But I digress…

When we first got back to the States, we were running on empty—physically, mentally, and emotionally. As such, we quickly learned which things “cost” the most in terms of energy or anxiety:

•           interacting with people we did not know well
•           being in large public places
•           choosing between a large amount of seemingly equal options

Being overwhelmed all the time was a weird phenomenon for us, and you may not fully understand it if you haven’t experienced it personally. It’s like the emotional version of being sore in unexpected ways after a new kind of intense exercise, but in this case, “being sore” means having trouble making eye contact with people, being completely incapable of answering the question, “What would you like for dinner?” and having a lot of anxiety even thinking about leaving the house. Going to church on a regular basis almost seemed out of the question.

The more we talk with former missionaries or read their blogs, the more we learn that these are common experiences for those returning from out of the country. And there’s one thing especially that everyone like us agrees is the absolute worst: Wal-Mart.

on setting the microwave clock (and other unhelpful solutions)

We got back last week from a 10-day trip to Nicaragua. The microwave clock at our friends' house where we stayed was consistently off by several hours, which naturally bothered me a great deal. I fixed it once, and when a few days later it was again wrong by an unreasonable amount of time, it made me laugh rather than annoyed. Here's why:

For the first year that we lived in Nicaragua, we shared an apartment with my brother and his wife and the first of their three children. (They had been living in country for about a year and a half by that point.) In addition to the learning curve of sharing living space with others, there was a much more stressful learning curve of adjusting to culture and climate. Every difference between Nicaragua and the States stood out sharply, and if I’m honest, these differences seemed poorly planned, inefficient, and sweaty*. I always wanted to shake my head and say, "What a crazy, backwards country!"