Today my friend. I want us to dig into something tender and often unspoken about. It is the myth of the perfect past. Welcome to starting over in the USA, the Expat Woman's Guide to overcoming homesickness, embracing cultural differences, and creating a new home away from home. On this podcast, we talk about leaving behind the familiar, you know, the pangs of homesickness and culture shock to the journeys of reinventing yourself. I'm Yolanda Reshemah. And after relocating six times, I know firsthand what it's like to start from scratch, feeling like both a foreign child and a foreign adult in a new world. We are going deeper into what happens when we romanticize the country we left. Especially when things get hard in the place we now call home. You'll hear stories and reflections and gentle tools to help you feel grounded when nostalgia starts to feel like the truth. Let's look at what we miss and what we forgot. I've come to realize that when you are homesick, you don't just miss home. We somehow, for some reason start idealizing it. I couldn't understand why any of us would do that, we spend our times doing the research. We got the passport and the visas and so on. We had compelling reasons to move so convinced were we that we packed our sofas, the cat and the kids I'm one of those people, as you know by now. About a year or so after moving to the us I caught myself craving typical British things like fish and chips, things I never really bothered about when I was there. I was longing for foggy nights in the pub with log fires. I hardly ever went to a pub. Why was I missing that? On foggy nights, I stayed at home. Pies and Sunday roast, English breakfast, all this stuff that I just did not eat when I was there. It's not that those things were not real, it's not that they weren't a part of my life, it's just that they were not the whole story. But I think I was long after them because they represented the culture and the vibrancy that came along with them, the smells, the sounds, and the topics of discussions that I had with good friends sitting in the beer garden I completely forgot about the longing for perpetual sunshine on those gray winter days. Forgot that I felt discomfort, I wanted to find what I could possibly do. What are the skills I could develop? I needed to discover aspects of myself that just were not going to happen whilst I was there. All of those things brought into my life and the limitations I felt. I'm realizing now that nostalgia can be so comforting, but it can also be terribly misleading for me it painted the past in soft light and made the present feel more harsh by comparison, I realized that that was a kind of myth the stories we tell ourselves about what home was really like, obliterating from our minds, the things that we disliked that caused us to move in the first place. That is really powerful. I can't help but ask myself, why would you do that? Why do we idealize? I think it must be a way of coping. I'd love to know what you think. I'm wondering if it's our minds way of saying. I want that security again. I think that's what it was for me. Could it be that? When we are overwhelmed by language or loneliness and the stuff is all unfamiliar, we haven't quite made the connections with the people within the timeline we had given ourselves, we immediately run back to home, run back to what's familiar and comforting, and we think about it in the best way possible. It was perfect. But here's the truth. I feel like It's just part of the process, purely and simply. But could we actually do without romanticizing? I'm not sure. It may be inevitable when our home, away from home just starts feeling difficult. How do we come back to the present? I ended up romanticizing life back in England especially during those days of pregnancy. Being a mom without my family, my support network, my culture, and everything that would otherwise help me and protect me and keep me sane. Those days when I had to really work hard to occupy myself mentally. looking back now. I realized that I had to put some structures in place like take baby for a five mile walk, that's when I was able to think things through, to give myself enough space and quiet to identify what was really troubling me. I realized that I was bored. I realized that I missed my family, that I was lonely and I missed the taste and the sounds of the cultures that I grew up in. I decided that I was gonna start taking a course I joined some moms groups. But it's also on these walks that I identified what wasn't working for me once I made a plan and I executed it. Some of those moms group, was not the right fit so I decided to work as a consultant. My brain cells were working. So I'm encouraging you to ask yourself my expat friend, are you in a position now as I was idealizing all the stuff about home simply because you are finding and building your community, it's a place of being uncomfortable. If you give in to idealizing, you could end up wanting to abandon this journey you are on. How do we come back to ourselves when the past feels like a warm blanket and for me reclaiming your story. How do we reclaim our story? Ask yourself: what am I fantasizing about that wasn't actually nourishing? What's quietly beautiful about where I am now? I used to fantasize about work, the thrill of it, the steep learning curve. Stiletto heels. Lovely suits. I missed that. I but then I'd remember the stressful bits, the long train journeys, train strikes, and packed trains with viruses caressing my face, being dreadfully sick every single year. I didn't realize that I should have been navigating my thoughts to what's quiet and beautiful about where I am right now. Eventually I started being grateful for the things around me. But it took a while. I had to really talk myself into it. I started realizing, ah, my gosh, I can feel the sun on my back. I can hear the waves lapping against the stones the present isn't perfect, but it is real it's where life is taking shape. I'm just relieved and thankful that I was able to talk myself out of it by going for walks and deciding to enjoy what surround me. Otherwise I would have ended up abandoning this plan, and would have missed everything that I'm experiencing now. I would've missed seeing the quails roaming around my garden, making a mess of it. The people that are in my life now, the things that I'm doing now, the steep learning curve of this podcast, I would've missed that. So it's important for us to remember that leaving our place, we didn't just actually leave, but there's also a story of arriving though we are going through really difficult and challenging times, we are not just surviving even if we are right now, it won't always be like that. It's the process of creating something new, the vision we had that made us leave in the first place. I am reminding myself, and encouraging you to write down what excites you about now, if your spot right now is so hard, write down the things that excites you. Not everything is going to be negative. If you search for the exciting and search for the positive, you will find them. The relationships you're forming how those relationships speak into your life, my life, the opportunities that they unfold. Every time you and I choose to be present, to deal with the fantasy, choosing reality over that, that's reclaiming the story, the story of why I move, the story of why you move. We are still living on what's possible, even with the challenges right now. Stay curious, stay grounded. Enjoy your day and I'll see you on the next episode.