It's okay to be okay.

Back at it again with another Slice of Life post. To set the stage, let's go back six or seven years when I was still in Sénégal with my family. At this point, I'd been in boarding school for five years, and I was DONE with it. Germany was the right place for me. I was growing up, I was sick of living on a campus surrounded by nothing but dirt and some cows, and, academically, there was really no other option. I felt ready to leave, and so my re-entry was, all things considered, rather pleasant. I started going to a Gymnasium (highest level of secondary school), and survived with only a few true Third Culture Moments. (We don't have "Vorfahrtsschilder*" in Sénégal, ok. How was I supposed to know. Leave me alone.)

Besides that, I

(1) made two good friends,

(2) was not picked on, and

(3) passed my finals with a fairly good mark

So, all in all, quite successful!

Where is my non-traumatising re-entry representation?

Now, this kind of transition is NOT the one that had been predicted for me. I'm sure some of you have read the book Letters Never Sent by Ruth Van Reken. It's absolutely gutting in places, and I relate to some of her earlier experiences so much. But re-entry? Honestly, it was so 'okay' it was almost boring. Some of us leaving boarding school had a mandatory 're-entry class': a course held by two well-meaning staff members trying to equip us with the tools to dealing with culture shock and losing-your-country grief.But - I wanted to leave! Not only was I not heartbroken to be leaving Sénégal, I was looking forward to it! I wanted the experience of living in Germany again. But my re-entry course teacher was so traumatised by her own experience that there was really no room for optimism. It was all 5 stages of grief this and re-entry curve that.

Add to the fact I had lived in two other countries beforehand (England and Canada), it wasn't even my childhood that I was leaving behind (maybe that's splitting hairs, it was my young adolescence). But, against all odds, I had an okay transition. Here is me representing that: the non-traumatising re-entry. It's okay to be part of the Okay Transition Squad.

...but we should still be empathetic.

Of course, it's not as if I had six-seven years of smooth sailing and now live a happy life as the neighbourhood cat lady. There were some un-dealt-with issues I brought with me from Sénégal that I had to resolve, there were the afore-mentioned TCK moments, and there is still a lot of 'wow, Germany is so much more alien than I thought it would be'. But the transition itself? Survivable. Not a big deal. However, in the years that followed, I saw so many TCK's telling their stories of grief and loss - and I wondered why I didn't feel the same. I spent a while oscillating between 'sucks to be you I guess' and 'maybe there's something wrong with me...'. Neither of those are very kind. And I learned, after a while, that there is value in the things we learned in re-entry class. It certainly made sense after I spent half a year atop a Papua Niuginian mountain. (That crash that follows the high of reaching your destination? Felt it, baby.) The culture shock that didn't hit me immediately upon reaching Germany has been slowly, but surely, doing my head in. It's like I finally worked out what I wanted to do after school, but now that I'm at university, everything is 100x more alien! I feel less German every day.

So, while some of us may not have had the gut-wrenching feeling of losing our home country while returning to our 'actual' home country - it isn't black and white either. Hence why this is the 'okay' re-entry squad. Re-entry isn't blissful, but it needn't be soul crushing either. And for those of us who don't relate to the negative extreme, we needn't ignore the advice given us. It's helpful in more ways than one, not all related to re-entry.

And, as always, experiences exist on a spectrum.

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*Right-of-way signs. Or priority signs? The second one sounds fake but it's what the online dictionary says.