There are many things people warn you about when you're moving away from home for the first time. I was moving to London for a year to finish my post-graduate degree and I was inevitably handed advice which ranged from being overly cautious to outright crazy.
A neighbour counselled, ‘Keep your friends close but your belongings closer in London. You will be robbed blind if you're not alert’. Relatives overshared and suggested that I steer clear of Shoreditch. ‘You will be knifed, robbed, killed or worse.’ She never did elaborate on what would be worse than being murdered. And then there were some lifesaving kind of advice: ‘Visit Kolapata when you're missing home, they have some of the best Bangladeshi food in London’.
My year in London passed without any hiccups. I had not lost my belongings or my life but gained a lifetime worth of memories. I have recently moved back to Dhaka and I suddenly realized that I was never cautioned against what to expect when you are moving back home.
The last few days of London passed in a haze. My parents were visiting me and so we spent much of our time being tourists and eating our fill of fish and chips at every pub possible. I was so thoroughly engrossed in being a tourist, that I had very little energy to mull over the fact that I would be leaving the city in a very short time. In hindsight, I regard this as some sort of blessing. You see, I have a penchant for being nostalgic and sentimental. Hence I surprised myself by keeping the waterworks at bay even when we had boarded our flight.
And even though I was distracted didn’t mean I was not thinking about the move on a constant basis. I knew the inevitable was to happen soon and I had been mentally preparing myself for a few weeks now. A friend asked what I would miss most about living alone aboard and without hesitation I replied that it would be my freedom. What else, he insisted. Well, I would miss the friends I made in London, I would miss the perfect gloom of a London day and the great gift of being answerable to no one but yourself alone.
My first week in Dhaka was bittersweet. I found myself in a strange position; I had not lived away long enough to completely shed the old me, yet you could easily see that I am not the same person either. Friends called and messaged asking what were my plans now and those that had made similar journey as me asked how I was dealing with the move. They knew, it seemed, that I would be having difficulty to just slip back into the humdrum of Dhaka life.
While I missed London and the amazing weather that is the beginning of fall, I was also enjoying being back home. I was with my family again, my friends were a car ride away and the curry never seemed to end. But a friend warned that once the novelty of the situation wore off, I might feel a tad bit overwhelmed. And rather than being a sitting duck, he urged me to be proactive and find some form of employment because in his experience that was what got him out of his funk. What I had kept from him was that I was already feeling overwhelmed. Being back in my old room was steadily feeling less comforting, the weather had begun to stifle me and having an entire family to answer to was slowly wearing me down. When I vented to my friends they asked me to be patient and ride out this period of funk. A bit assured I took one day at a time and furiously looked for some form of employment.
By the following week, I had started working as a contributor for a local magazine and my life was getting in a routine again. I still met with friends and complained but I had also started to slowly integrate myself back into my life again. During the same time, I started to interview for a few jobs that I felt that I was a good fit for and I steadily started feeling like my old self again.
The desperate search for jobs slowly wound down as the preordained happened and I was slowly lulled back into the comfort and familiarity of my home. The overwhelmed feelings were being sneakily replaced with gratefulness of being able to be with my family again, but mostly due to not having to do dishes. Before you judge me too harshly, let me tell you how I struggled with doing my dishes. They were a constant thorn on my side; the crux of my existence; my kryptonite. It bought the strongest of my flat-mates to their knees, destroyed my nails and was just so mundane in nature that I would deliberate about just buying new ones. Hence my gratitude knew no bounds when I was relived of that task.
Another one of my favourite coping mechanisms was working out. The last few months in London had been completely hijacked by my dissertation and healthy eating had been its first victim. Having always enjoyed training, I was glad to be able to go back to my routine again of eating clean and exercising on a daily basis. After a particularly rough day, when all I wanted was to wallow in self pity, destroying a workout routine made me feel like I had gained back some of the losses of the day. And while the fat hasn’t melted away, I am not losing much sleep over it since I had a ton of fun accumulating them in the first place.
If you ask me now, I would still say that the overwhelmed feeling makes a come back to disturb my equilibrium sometime. But it soon fizzles out when I start going about my day. Or if it continues to persist I draw on my outstanding support network of family and friends who assure me that the worse has passed and things can only get better from now on.