The Homebody Expat: Part III

Unlike my little hometown, Istanbul would not wake me to the sound of sweet birdsong and soft breezes through trees. On the contrary…

From our windows came the calls of jackdaws: a clever sort of bird, black and gray with pale blue eyes.
Once they discovered that I would leave out leftover bread outside the kitchen window, they would call to me for more in the mornings, sometimes coming to the bedroom to peck the window if I was still asleep.

The dogs guarding the shops across the street were never off-duty.
They barked at the men who pulled heavy white carts.
These men scour the streets and garbage bins for anything that can be sold for recycling, and toss it into their giant cart.
And when they went down the steep hill of our street, they would lean back, using the heels of their worn shoes and the metal frame of the cart as a makeshift brake system.
Metal against asphalt screeches as they slide, the dogs chasing them along the way—barking, and nipping at their heels until they feel they’ve successfully scared away the “intruder”, and return to their station.

When there was something to celebrate, such as a wedding, everyone was to be informed (whether they wanted it or not).
Honking. So much honking by a parade of cars down the street.
Even if the traffic brought them to a complete stop below our apartment, all the cars would proceed to honk at no one and at everyone all at once.
It wasn’t uncommon for some to bring a gun, and fire into the air from their cars.

Semi trucks were regular visitors on our street.
They struggled and groaned and puffed exhaust gas as they climbed the hill to the intersection beneath our window.
The trucks would often be too big to navigate the intersection without the help of people from the street shouting directions over the noise of the truck (“Gel, gel, gel, gel, gel, gel!”) amidst the impatient honks of waiting traffic.

For the two years I would spend in Istanbul, my sensitive self would be in a constant state of overstimulation to the city.

Rather than face my discomfort of the noise and the crowds, I would stay at home.
I would miss out on what I could have explored. And Istanbul has much more to offer than one noisy street!
I wouldn’t make friends, nor improve my Turkish speaking skills, being too shy to speak with anyone.

Many people would be outraged to hear this. How dare I not take full advantage of the expat experience!
And I can’t debate them on this.

I may have traveled across the world, but I took my little bubble of a comfort zone with me. And that bubble only extended to the walls of our tiny apartment.
I didn’t become one of those inspiring stories about a shy, small-town girl being transformed by her new world into an enthusiastic explorer.
Although I deliberately tried to adapt to this new life, something in my subconscious kept me stubbornly maladapted. Unchangeable.

With all of this said, you can imagine how much of this expat life is completely against my character. And I’ve only covered the noise aspect!
And yet…
I loved it.

The Unlikely Expat

The Homebody Expat: Part II

June 6, 2022June 6, 2022 Brittany BulutLeave a comment

“Close your eyes, tap your heels together three times, and think to yourself,
‘there’s no place like home, there’s no place like home.'”

I would stay in Turkey to visit my partner and his family for three months.
Three months in a massive, crowded, noisy city which sharply contrasted from the quiet, sheltered life I’d grown up in and loved.
Three months of being overwhelmed with feelings of anxiety, curiosity, and admiration.

And when I returned to my quiet little town, I’d expected to appreciate the quiet living more than ever before. And I did.
Yet…
There was a shift. An unsettled feeling within me that I couldn’t shake.
I wasn’t comfortable at home anymore.
Where was the variety, the excitement, the chaos?

Before I had traveled outside the US, I’d looked at my hometown with the assumption of “this is as good as it can get.”
But now, my eyes were set to a new filter: everything I saw now, I had somewhere else to compare it with:

“The traffic here is more peaceful than in Istanbul… But the drivers are less cautious as a result. They don’t respond to problems as fast here.”

“I like waking up to sweet birdsong here, rather than the crows and honking cars of the city.”

“The food in Turkey is so much better than American food.”

“Why are we all wearing our outside shoes inside?!”

But here’s the thing: I didn’t feel a longing to move to Istanbul. I didn’t miss everything about Turkish culture or big city life.
In fact, if I were to choose which feels more like home, I still would have chosen my small town in a heartbeat.
Only now, I wasn’t satisfied with it.

There is a special word for such a feeling. One which you won’t find in any dictionary besides that of John Koenig’s “The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.”
This word is “ozurie.”
He describes it as that feeling that Dorothy must have felt upon returning home from Oz. That “maddening state of tension, trying to live in two worlds at once.”
“Which will it be—Kansas or Oz?”
“Do you plunge into a Technicolor riot of what might be, harsh and delirious and confusing? Or do you accept the humble beauty of ordinary life, where nothing ever changes and everything is simple?“
“…Soon enough, life will offer you an answer. But for the moment, you are like Dorothy, sitting up in her bed, trying to decide which pair of slippers she wants to wear today. Black or ruby? Black or ruby?”

My sense of where “home” is hadn’t just moved from one place to another.
It became scattered, to a point where neither option could satisfy me completely.
There was no moving anywhere to fix the feeling.
I was determined to wait for this discomfort to fade. I needed it to fade.
I needed to feel at home again.
I wasn’t Dorothy, dreaming of traveling over the rainbow.
I was a homebody.
A mousey, introverted, socially-anxious homebody.
I wanted to feel at home without having to face the new, the foreign, the unexpected.

As I waited, I tried to satisfy this discomfort.
I dyed my hair red.
I rescued ferrets to take care of and give a luxurious life.
I turned the music in my car loud, and sang my frustration into the night.
But after nearly a year, that feeling hadn’t faded.

And there were new problems.
The immigration process for my partner to come here would prove more time-demanding and dispiriting than we’d counted on. Not to mention the racism he’d faced by my countryfolk in his short visits here still burned painfully (and embarrassingly) in my mind.

So it was time to decide: What if I go there instead?

And within one month of that question, I was back on that plane to Istanbul.
This time, with a one-way ticket.

The Unlikely Expat

The Homebody Expat: Part I

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The Step Out the Door

“The Ozarks is where I belong.”

This wasn’t a declaration of pride, but rather a simple, subconscious inner agreement that I was satisfied where I was:
in my small hometown, where things felt familiar, predictable.

As an introvert with high levels of social anxiety, these were desirable qualities. I wanted peace and comfort; not adventure and surprises.
The rest of the world was just a story I wasn’t interested in reading. A book to keep on a high shelf and collect dusty cobwebs.

But love can make you do crazy things.

Four years before I became a world traveler, I met my partner. A foreigner who lived across the world, and was only visiting the US for the summer. We would cope with being in a long distance relationship for those years, our only reprieves being the few summers he could visit me.
But eventually, it would be my turn to visit him.

By this time, I was 23 years old.
I had never stepped foot outside the USA.
Had never been on a plane on my own.
Had never even ventured more than 2 hours from home by myself.
And was no less burdened by my oppressive social anxiety.

But here I was, not taking just a teensy step outside my comfort zone.
But instead, going on a solo trip that would last 24 hours, flying me across the world to Istanbul, Turkey.

The Unlikely Expat

The Overlooked Trials of Grocery Shopping as an Expat

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It was my first morning in the Netherlands.
I got out of bed, light on my feet, the air charged with my own exhilaration.
I poured my cereal, and stood looking out the window at my new home of Rotterdam as I took my first bite—
And spit it out.
Sour milk.
I looked again at the liter of milk, and asked Google Translate what I’d done wrong.
My very first, excited purchase in this country had, indeed, been buttermilk for my cereal.

My heart sank with that familiar heaviness of discouragement.
I’d just spent two years in Turkey, relearning how to adapt to that new world.
And now, I had to relearn things all over again.

In the US, grocery shopping had been a mundane affair.
I knew exactly what I liked from years of experience and from simply growing up with my family’s trusted brands.
But when I moved abroad, the comfortable familiarity vanished.
And suddenly, I had to figure out what the decent prices are and what I like all over again.
With everything.

As someone who strives to be a smart shopper, and whose indecision nearly matches that of Chidi Anagonye in “The Good Place,” grocery shopping was mentally exhausting for me in the beginning.
Which grocery stores are the best choices, considering quality and price?
Are these more expensive dish soap brands worth trying?
Will any of these lotions soothe my cracking, wintery hands?
And the questions continued. From food to cleaning supplies to hygiene and self-care products.

Being as thrifty as I am, learning through trial and error has been emotionally painful.
From eating my terrible food choices, to donating products I regretted getting.
But throughout this past year, I’ve gotten a better grasp of this small part to being an expat in the Netherlands.

This meant learning enough Dutch to not even feel bothered when Google Translate (offline) told me that “vloeibare ontstopper” is “liquid blame,” rather than a drain cleaner.
I can now just read the labels and instructions on the bottle instead.

It meant figuring out what brands I prefer, like which chocolate will get me through the rainiest and windiest days here.

It meant getting the hang of the store hours in the Netherlands— some opening as late as noon, or closing as early as 5:30pm!

It meant noticing which products go up for sale frequently, so I could stock up on them accordingly.

And a very important part of adapting to life here: becoming an expert at purchasing only as much as can fit on my bicycle!

Grocery shopping is only a small part of expat life.
There is so much more to learn and get used to in a new country!
To the point that, with all of it added up, it can feel overwhelming.
But, it gets easier.
And eventually, even in this foreign land, that sense of comfortable familiarity returns to you.

The Unlikely Expat

The Sentimental Expat: Obsession with Memories

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When a Homebody Becomes an Expat

When I saw that orange box of Arm&Hammer baking soda in the aisle, I must have perplexed the customers around me as I suppressed a scream of excitement and ran to it, eyes glittering. This, strangely enough, was a reminder of my homeland.
This was an unexpected part of me becoming an expat.
Not all of us adapt to living abroad with ease. Some of us were homebodies before we left our homeland, and become a bit too sentimental over our memories when we move.

The Cloak of Homeland Memories

When we move to a new country, there is a lot to adapt to. New languages, new people, new cultures, new stores, new jobs, new mannerisms, new bank accounts, new lifestyles. And for some of us, it’s hard to adapt to so many changes at once.
So we dawn on our cloak of homeland memories. Its cloth is made of warm, fluffy nostalgia that you can’t help but wrap yourself tightly in. It has images of your favorite memories printed all over. It has a special, warm smell of your sense of “home”. It makes you feel safe and secure as long as you’re wearing it. It’s a security blanket to cling to in foreign lands, when everything else feels uncertain.
But people like me tend to wear it too tightly. To draw the hood so far down that we hide ourselves from the new world, and it from us.

We see only what reminds us of home.
We concentrate only on smells that take us back.
We listen only for the familiar.
We live only for memories.

The Power of Memory Triggers

The breeze brushes against my face. I inhale. There’s a faint yet familiar scent.
Sun-warmed grass and August wildflowers.
My mind convulses as I’m jolted into the reliving of cherished moments in the US. I swim in the bliss of that fond memory for a moment, and crave to find that precise aroma again so that I can revisit it. I become frustrated when that moment ends.
In an instant, my cheerful mood is mutated into lonely melancholy.
All within one breath.

Among our senses, smell is the most powerful in triggering vivid and emotional memories.
Sadly for me, I have a hypersensitive sense of smell. And I’m sentimental. So this means that I have the “pleasure” of recalling such intense, abrupt memories often. My past is always intermingled with the present.

I enjoy wearing the cloak of homeland memories. But it doesn’t come without its risks. If you wear it long enough, homesickness overwhelms you. Any little thing can make your heart ache with longing. You’re plagued by the constant reminder that you can’t live in two places at once, no matter how much may you want to. That when you’re living in one country, you’re missing out on another.

The Danger of Unauthentic Memories

When we miss something, we tend to visit only their best features in our recollections. And when we’re left alone with these one-sided memories long enough, our perspective becomes skewed. This is how we set ourselves up for a truly unpleasant experience:
The reverse culture shock.
It is returning to our homeland, only to be stupefied when it doesn’t match our expectations and mental image we’d been carrying. It is having an emotional breakdown in a Perkins Restaurant not an hour from leaving the airport, because everything about home now feels so foreign.

It’s a scary reality to face, when we realize we don’t recognize our own homeland anymore. And more often, it’s not the country that’s changed, but ourselves. The experiences of travel changes us and how we perceive the world.

The Fragility of Nostalgia

I get that familiar scent of grass, and am again brought back to the bliss of recollection. But something else happens. Every time I’m hit by this nostalgia, the breeze seems to take just a bit of that intensity with it.
The cost of remembering becomes forgetting.
Forgetting that special sensation. Diluting it, until it becomes but a memory of something special; a feeling which I can no longer conjure it to its original strength.

No matter how tightly I might wrap the cloak of homeland memories around me, it begins to lose its warmth. The coziness fades, and discomfort increases.
Because I begin to change. I adapt to my new surroundings. I start to associate these memory triggers not just with my past, but also with where I am now. The past blends with the present.

So I develop a possessiveness over my memories. A desperate desire to keep them secret, keep them safe.
“If I just don’t think of them, maybe they won’t fade.” But memories always come to the surface, even in a foreign land. There’s just no stopping it.

Letting Them Go

Since I moved abroad, I’ve lost that concrete sense of what “home” is supposed to feel like.
I feel a part of it now in three different countries, but not completely in any of them.
I think it is this reason that I tend to cling to those memories that felt most like home. Because that feeling is harder to grasp now. That cloak of homeland memories makes me feel safe, secure, and certain.

But we cannot live in the past and the present at the same time. And even if we do hold on to the past with all our emotional strength and desperation, it won’t be enough. Because memories, no matter how precious, are subject to change. Whether it’s their form, their intensity, or our feelings toward them.

But that’s alright. Because life is not about staying the same. Things grow, things change, and things pass. And if we’re stuck in place dreaming of what was, we’re missing out on what matters now.
Learning to loosen our slack on the memories doesn’t mean forgetting everyone and everything in our homeland. It’s about keeping a healthy balance.
Otherwise, our hearts and minds would stay cluttered with the past.
Why not, instead, clear some space to allow ourselves to breathe?
Sometimes we must be okay with allowing some things to fade, and new things to grow.
With allowing ourselves to grow.

Our memories demand careful care:
Hold on too tightly, and the sorrow will consume us.
Change the memories to our liking, and we make our reality disappointing.
Grieve our human tendency to forget, and we’ll miss the opportunity to live.

And that concludes it!
If you could relate to this obsession with memories in your own life, feel free to let me know in the comments.
Thank you for reading!