December 26, 2023 - On the surface, it seems like a silly act to start a travel blog five years since I moved back to the States, when the furthest I've traveled since throwing in the towel on international teaching was from San Diego to Sonoma County for a girls' weekend. But that's just the thing, isn't it? The difference between the surface and what lies below.
What makes a person interesting? If you look at me today - well, let's be honest, there aren't a whole lot of people who look at me today for starters - but if you did, you'd likely have no idea that there's anything going on inside my head besides the awful cold I had over Christmas. But pluck me up and put me and my family on an airplane to Lomè, Togo and suddenly I'm somebody with a story.
We all have different ways of categorizing the people we meet, putting them in boxes to help us better understand them - introverts vs. extroverts, city mouse vs. country mouse, black vs. white, the haves vs. the have nots. For me, I think of a scene from S.E. Hinton's That Was Then, This Is Now in which the main characters visit a fortune teller who tells them which of them will leave the town and which will stay. Or at least this is how I remember it over 40 years later. Throughout my 20s and 30s, I was one of the ones who left and in doing so I found a community of other Leavers - a group of white collar migrants often referred to as ex-pats, a privileged status many have argued is just a way of distinguishing between white and non-white immigrants or those from countries with more global power.
When you're a foreigner in a country, it's easy to be recognized as a Leaver. When I first moved to Lomè, Togo, I lived near the Peace Corps office. It was such a rare sighting to see another white person or American in Togo that I felt no qualms about greeting perfect strangers on the street and asking if they were Peace Corps Volunteers (PCV) and introducing myself as a teacher from the American school and a former PCV. Likewise, I met one of my favorite people in life when she randomly introduced herself at a bar and talked me into staying out later than I had planned. That friendship changed the entire trajectory of my life in Lomè.
So what happens when you Return? When your skin color or accent or the way you dress or the fact that you are walking your runaway toddler on a backpack leash down the sidewalk don't automatically scream "foreigner" as if you had a neon sign on your forehead. Who are you when you walk and talk and look like the millions of others around you? When there are no longer village kids greeting you in the morning singing "Yovo, yovo, bonsoir..." or running behind you chanting "Një, dy, tre, katër" in Albanian when you go for a jog?
For me, the disappearance was abrupt the moment I stepped into my home airport. The sliding into obscurity and invisibility so jarring that I lost myself. Of course, there are a dozen other factors - sliding into my 40s, the extra pounds around my midline, changing careers, a global pandemic, and working at home - but when a Leaver is no longer out there, and instead sitting right here - how does one make meaning out of life as a Returner? Can I truly be myself without leaving again?
I'm hoping that this writing journey will help me answer that question and in the process introduce others to the stories below the surface, so that I may be known and seen and believe again in the value of my own voice.
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