Despite being American and growing up in the United States, I have been feeling overly distant from its culture now that I have returned from Belgium. The European bluntness and raw emotion that once felt so intimidating is now so natural, and I find myself unable to replicate the effervescence of the Americans around me. I am truly grateful for the constant use of face masks, for without them, I am sure I would be the only resting face in a sea of smiles.
It continues to shock me that in the mouths of many Americans, every experience is ‘good’ or ‘great,’ and ‘how are you’ is asked less as a question and more as a greeting. I continue to pause when asked how my day is going, never knowing if the person asking is serious or not. I was relieved to meet a friend from Sweden a few weeks ago - laughing, we said to ourselves, "finally - someone else who is blunt!"
As I pulled into the driveway of my childhood home, I was astonished at just how BIG it was. Houses of that size simply did not exist anywhere that I visited in Europe, and to see the wide driveways and ample yard space in American suburbs feels almost uncomfortable. I suppose that after adopting a new way of looking at the world, some things will never quite feel the same.
The odd thing about Brussels in particular is that so many people are bilingual, I communicated with most of my friends and colleagues in a French-English hybrid that has left me now struggling to communicate properly. I use ‘en effet’ as if it were English, as well as ‘en tout cas’ and ‘bon.’ Unfortunately, this is not taken well, since as far as anyone around me is concerned, I am ‘American,’ and any missteps are mistaken as pretentiousness.
And that, at its root, is what makes reverse culture shock so difficult. In Belgium, everyone knew that I was foreign. While I did make cultural missteps, I was aided by others’ understanding that I was still learning the culture. In my own country, I am not awarded the same flexibility. I am expected to know how to communicate, expected to know the line where honesty becomes too blunt. What people fail to realize is that this line differs all over the world, and spending even a few months in a country where certain topics are or are not off limits can make re-learning your own country’s culture a rather difficult task.
I have some friends who have lived abroad for over twenty years, and I cannot even begin to imagine how they must feel. After only two years, I feel in the United States the same way I initially felt in Belgium. I know that, within a short time, many of these feelings will disappear. However, I also know that, like many, I have been impacted by the values of another culture, and some things will never quite feel right. Just like having friends scattered all around the world, I suppose that never feeling at home in one place is the price I must pay for having had the opportunity to live elsewhere.