Coming back

For the first time in, I don't know, weeks, maybe months, I have time and space to stop, to breathe, to think.

Part of me is exhaling, saying, "finally". Part of me is frantically looking around, desperate for something to do, something to distract.

I'm writing from Portstewart, a small town on the north coast of Northern Ireland: a place where I've eaten many ice creams, where the familiar beaches stretch for miles, where the sound of the waves makes it easier to rest. It's a place where you are forced to stop. And, as much as I've tried to resist it, I'm coming to the conclusion that that's exactly what I need to do.

I've been back in Northern Ireland for about a week, back after six and a half years in New Zealand, almost as far on the other side of the world as you can get. I'm home...right?

But what happens when home is not synonymous with comfort? What happens when the familiar feels foreign? What happens when the surface of everything that looks the same scratches off to reveal a core that looks so different? Because, I suppose, the only constant thing in life is change. It's the only guarantee: places will change, circumstances will change, people will change.

It's gradual; like a rock being worn down by the waves, the attrition changing its shape, its size, its texture. And when you take that rock from its base, position it under different waves and leave it a while before taking it back to the place where it formerly slotted in cosily, you'll find that it no longer fits. The rock has changed and the base, under the influence of its own waves, has changed as well.

I am not the same as I was when I left Northern Ireland. New Zealand wore me down in some places, built me up in others. My body currently has no clue what time zone it is in and sometimes I forget which words are Kiwi and which are British. Is it a capsicum or a pepper? Football or soccer...or rugby? Have these people heard of Kimbra or Stan Walker or Liam Messam or Pineapple Lumps? And do these ones know about craic or the Giants Causeway or the 12th of July or Percy Pigs? Thousands of pieces of information making up who I am, different from the the thousands of pieces that make up who you are. And different from the thousands of pieces that made up me six and a half years ago.

I have changed. I hope mostly for the good, but probably in a lot of ways, neither good or bad. Just different. With nearly seven years of physiotherapy under my belt, I think I am more confident in understanding and interacting with people. After several years of talking to a counsellor and being forced to stop avoiding my issues, I know better how to deal with things that previously overwhelmed me. After living in a different culture, being forced out of my bubble, I'm a little bit braver than I used to be. I know more about what I want and what I need to do to get there (more, not all). And I finally feel like I'm pointing in a direction that will lead me down the right path.

These are all good things, but at the moment, I'm just finding it hard to know how those changes fit, how I can slot back into this place that was once my comfort zone.

It's easy to forget that when you're away from a place and its people, it's not just you that changes; they change too. Even the simple things: I can't work out how to use the TV at home, I have no idea how much a pint of milk costs and no clue what bus I need to catch to get into the city. And people change most of all. It's human nature, and it's good and important, but sometimes I feel a bit like we're edging around each other trying to work out where the connections were and if we can get them back or make new ones. With some people, it's easy, but more often than not, it's uncomfortable, to start with at least.

So, what to do? I think the choice comes somewhere on a sliding scale: at one end, I could forget NZ and everything that happened there, not keeping in touch with anyone or using any of the skills I acquired there; on the other end, I can hold on to NZ, starting every sentence with "that's not how we do it there" and refusing to let myself forget any detail. There is a war between these two end and in that war, I need to pick my battles. I need to decide which are the important things to hold on to and which things it would serve me better to let go of. For example, I need to hold on to the confidence I gained in interacting with people, but realise that

even my best friends probably don't want to see a hundred pictures of my NZ cats (but maybe just one little one).

There's fear in it: what if I forget it all, lose it all. And there is sadness, because it hurts to let go, to realise that there's no going back to how it was, that a loss has occurred. And it's easy to get caught up in that, which drives you to the clinging end of the scale, but that end of the scale is impossible to live on, if you want to be happy.

The reality is, I don't live in NZ any more and I can't live like I do, but I can live in a way that acknowledge my life there and uses that to make a life here, which includes keeping in touch with the important people.

So, that is the question I'm asking myself now...how do I remember my time in NZ well and how do I best use it to move forward? Looking forward in the light shed by the past - isn't that what we all need to do? Wherever we've come from, wherever we're going, it's the first step in getting there.