Opportunity cost of living abroad : The harsh truth nobody talks about

My first post after two years almost as I rarely like to express my views on a public forum anymore. However I think this is an issue which maybe helpful for people or can act as a guiding/relating or reflective medium. 

There comes a time when you are sitting somewhere in the comfort of your room, all alone, sipping some bourbon only to realize that somehow, somewhere and out of the blue you have just grown up. People always need unexpected circumstances and situations to 'grow up'. All of a sudden you have become more mature, more responsible and yet so complex at the same time. So here is one such moment where I just pen down the experience that has completely changed my life. The experience of living abroad. The experience of living two lives so distinct and yet so synchronized.  

It is hard to deny the fact that once you are out of the comfort zone of our home, living in a country which is fundamentally different from the home country, an individual for sure goes through a process of change. You start adapting to the new environment you move into, you start to adopt and adapt a new personality, new manners, new rituals, new food habits,  new clichés and the list goes on and on. The byproduct of these gradual changes is a new person altogether which reacts and acts in a different way because that was the sole purpose or the premise on which one decides to live in a new place anyway. The main reason to grow and transform as a person and put yourself out of the comfort zone and letting oneself free. You start making efforts, adjustments and last but not the least you start measuring things in absolute gain or absolute loss. It is the basic nature you adapt when you are out of your comfort zone and you make more optimal choices which will give you short term to long term gains. Some of the friends you make during the transitory period are also more opportunistic rather than selective. Be it people who you live with, people who are your classmates, people who you hang out with or sometimes even opportunistic travelers and immigrants you meet a new country. You never choose these friends. All these people come and stay in your life for a purpose or reason and all of a sudden you are more open to befriending strangers before you know it.  

This is the reason we really cannot quantify or qualify the friendship in real sense of the people we make friends especially during exchange trips, study abroad, backpackers etc. The real friendship can only be judged when you lose contact and is directly correlated to the efforts people make in the real sense to be 'friends' and sustain a long term oriented bond with one another. A very unique feature of people living together from different countries or in a new environment is the fact that they tend to stick together for a stipulated time, be it bars, coffee places, restaurants or even movies for the matter of fact. There is strange melancholic process of infusion into a new culture and surroundings which most of us go through while in a new country.  There is always the feeling of unrelated-ness towards the new country however hard you try to get it out of your system.  The initial stages include anxiety, excitement and fear of getting to know the place, getting to understand the surrounding, making new friends across nationalities and dealing with the stereotypes of different countries and constant mind mapping coupled with credibility checks of the stereotypes you learned all your life as well. After months, years or so you tend to be less focused on living and adapting and starts introspecting as to what are the changes that are actually occurring day by day in your personality, attitudes and overall behavior of a person with people from back home or even the new friends you makes. You tend to look around and reflect on what's actually missing and what all should be achieved. Living abroad does that to you sometimes, it makes you more of a critique - of yourself and others, you start analyzing small things, giving yourself more time to understand things. You tend to put different thinking hats just in order to quantify and qualify achievements and losses. It makes us more humane in a way but thereby also making us more materialistic. The major upside is however discipline and a forward looking and gradually inclining growth trajectory with respect to understanding the self, different people, cultures, business styles and actually judging what is acceptable where while in a situation away from your home country.

So when I look back sometimes I find a cobweb of many things entangled together. There comes point as well when you realize friendships have been destroyed, relationships have turned sour, bridges have been burnt down and love is just an emotion not a overhyped characteristic feature or element that changes life or for which people live in the hypothetical world. It is just a byproduct of two people being together in a span of time. Again being materialistic and gradually changing personality has its downfalls every time.  While at one point of time living alone in a new environment gives you liberation and a refreshing alternative of spending time with whoever you want it also makes you understand that you always have a baggage of people you were once with, in the past. It is at this point of time you actually realize that you are geographically based even on the types of emotions you feel. Your being can no longer be altogether at one place. People you met in the past always stay with you and you somehow tend to put the baggage of people both good and bad with your actions and experiences on individuals you meet in the present. You have already left a part of you at home, some of it where ever you go and indefinite of amount personal growth and knowledge only makes new parts of you to be left at different places. 

The introspection powers increase with a multiplicative factor as you are in charge of yourself all the time while living alone and making your own 'responsible' decisions. You start overtly talking to yourself, seeking answers from within, appreciating and criticizing your actions again n again passively and slowly making it a part of your subconscious. You start to enjoy the chase sometimes, the chase to start from scratch. the chase to support yourself. You start living just for you and in absolute terms. these are the times when even things like shopping for food becomes a experience in itself where you look at six different types of variety of milk for example and analyze which is the best for you and your life but in the end buy the cheapest one as it is more liberating. You start to live meagerly, make choices, good and bad, criticize our choices and then yet plan ahead on experiences of the present. You tend to be in a cycle of re-learning, re-doing and re-engaging yourselves with routine activities and finding optimal ways to do everything big and small. You start being more of a atypical personality sometimes. More often than not I have found the saying that you become someone you hate accurate as when you are alone you want to do things you were never expected to do, which in the end always makes the personality more diffusive and absolute rather than more proactive - a heavy downside of living alone with taking your own care.

Having enumerated all these aspects, the maximum change with no exception occurs when you tend to realize the geographically dispersed life of yours is actually going at a constant rate with or without our present being present physically or in spirits. When you analyze home you see a truly different story, you see birthdays you never celebrated, weddings you never attended, games you never played, live sporting events you never were able to be a part of with your friends, family dinners you lost on, relatives who lost contact with you or who you lost touch with on the way and the list goes on. You tend to realize there are people who you were never with in their last stages of life, who you could not explain, people who you could have cleared your differences with etc. Many people say modern technology has made it less hard but I never believed in this ever as I always think that emotions and feeling are to be felt and sometimes touched, merely looking into the web camera, or talking on the phone for hours never actually correct the problem of living in different time zones. We are fundamentally not made that way in my opinion.

When you realize the actual magnitude of changes together the reality hits you hard. Nothing remains constant and if you are in a trance so is the environment you left. Children grow up, your cousins are taller and more mature all of a sudden, you can actually see your parents and grandparents getting old like a iphone app which shows before and after pictures and where you can actually feel their bodies getting old, wrinkles on their face and grey hair all of a sudden. It is at times like these you realize the sand has actually completed many cycles in an hourglass which you thought might just stop when you are leaving your home. All of a sudden you become an outsider to your own 'home'. People around you start looking at you differently, even close friends and relatives start judging the basic core person inside the body that has just been back from a trip overseas. You find it harder to talk about things as your ideas have changed, attitudes and thoughts about different things have changed, there seems an unimaginable amount of transparent distance between close friends. It all comes down to a basic rule when you win some you have to lose some as well in order to keep balance, however the problem is one cannot actually judge the opportunity cost till the time you actually return home after certain months or years.  The change and loss is all of a sudden evident, economics, physics or any other sciences cannot give you back whatever you lost. Not even photographs or videos of moments you lost to time because your being was somewhere else making a new part of 'you' in a new unrelated environment.

So to cut short my unlimited potential of pondering powers, your life is suddenly divided into two unrelated geographically dispersed parts. Two distinct personalities, alter egos, different accents, mannerisms and overall diverse and distinct social stature. The relationships, friendships you have made makes the cobweb more entangled as you cannot undermine the old relationships as well as the ones made in the new environment as everything in some way or the other is your personal baggage and part of yourself. You tend to long the part you are missing always ignoring the ones you have at least that is what happens with me personally, You tend to have different sources, and associations of 'happiness' with different 'parts' of the same life altogether. It takes so much to carve out a new life for yourself somewhere in a new environment, and it can’t die simply because you’ve moved over a few time zones. The people that took you into their country and became your new family, they aren’t going to mean any less to you when you’re far away and back to your home. The reality concurs that you have multiple homes now as well.

When you live abroad, you realize that, no matter where you are, you will always be an ex-pat. There will always be a part of you that is far away from its home and is lying dormant until it can breathe and live in full color back in the country where it belongs. To live in a new place is a beautiful, thrilling thing, and it can show you that you can be whoever you want — on your own terms. It can give you the gift of freedom, of new beginnings, of curiosity and excitement. But to start over, to get on that plane, doesn’t come without a price. You cannot be in two places at once, and from now on, you will always lay awake on certain nights and think of all the things you’re missing out on back home. You will miss the friends you made, the friends you had when you had nobody else in the new country. The people along the way who became one of the most focal point of your life and suddenly went away again to their own destination taking a part of you along with them and leaving a part of them with you to ponder and remember all the moments - good and bad. So here I am finishing my bourbon induced thought process of my living abroad journey which has carved out two people from a single born person back in time. Today, I am what I am because of the people I have met all along the way, the people who have been my everything to simply names and people for whom I will always be a family wherever I go in the world or this life per se. This is the account of a reality nobody talks about while living abroad. It is not only fun, enjoyment, partying, freedom, drinking and one night stands, it is much more than that, it is process  of gradual struggle to balance lives, careful calibration of the will and yet working on the self continuously while living in different worlds, living different lives of an expat. The consequences of actions, changes in the self and overall growth all around are far greater in magnitude and depth than the mind usually processes at the time we think about living alone in a new environment.

Ps. I know what I have discussed here is not universal, everybody goes through different aspects and different situations and in the end experiences guide your thought process. Some things discussed in the post are understood however only by people who have actually been expats or have been on exchange programs of sorts and hence it is only a substantial take away for those who will be going through the process.

Cheers

Tanmay