Do you know this feeling?

Whenever I get back from traveling, I always feel kind of weird for the first couple of days. Do you know what I mean? Transportation today has made it easier than ever to cover long distances in a very short amount of time, so sometimes I think the mind is trying to catch up with your body. Having breakfast in one place and dinner on a different continent seems just a bit much. So the three-day post-travel daze is more than understandable, it actually is necessary. People aren't machines. We need to adapt to changes in our environment, and if those changes are happening too fast, we get disorientated. It is a rather difficult state to describe - there is the cliché of being neither here nor there, and there definitely is some truth to that. When we leave our home, we often expect the place to have changed while we were away. But that hardly ever happens, as Alain de Botton laments in his book The Art of Travel: 'I returned to London from Barbados to find that the city had stubbornly refused to change. I had seen azure skies and giant sea anemones [...]. But the home town was unimpressed.' (243) This expresses beautifully how we desperately try to uncover a physical manifestation of a mental change, however small it may be. De Botton goes on saying the following:  'When we are in a good mood and it is sunny, it is tempting to impute a connection between what happens inside and outside of us, but the appearance of London on my return was a reminder of the indifference of the world to any of the events unfolding in the lives of its inhabitants.' (243) And if our home didn't change, we hope we ourselves did.

 

As soon as I got back to Vienna, I immediately felt truly at home. I was grateful to be back, to see my friends and family and to walk around in the beautiful city of Vienna. But that doesn't mean I didn't feel different. Everything felt familiar, but still new and fresh. I don't have the eyes of a tourist, but it is still not the same as it was before. Is this a desirable goal? People often want to be changed by their travels. It seems that a time abroad, however short it may be, is deemed a success if it comes with some personal changes. Why is that? And more importantly, what comes after that?

I already mentioned the short-term effects of traveling, as I experience them. That strange feeling for a few days, of being somewhere familiar yet new, a kind of limbo state, we usually snap out of and return to our daily lives as we lived them before. And this is even true for the shortest weekend trip. So what would it mean for a 10 month period spent abroad? Is the effect multiplied? And it what way -duration or intensity of the experience, or maybe even both? Odysseus didn't recognized his hometown after sailing the seas for ten years, trying to find his way back after a terrible war. Now, I'm not comparing myself to Odysseus in any way, but I believe that people can relate to this unfamiliarity of the familiar. It actually connects to Freud's notion of the Uncanny ('das Unheimliche'). A state in which the familiar suddenly seems foreign or alien, which leads to an unsettling feeling of discomfort. In a horror film, for example, this would be the scene where the protagonist visits a playground in the middle of the day, and everything seems as it always is, until suddenly the swings start moving, or the see-saw screeches. Freud defined it as a 'class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once familiar'. (Freud, p. 1). He also made it clear that it differs from the feeling of fear.

I wouldn't say that me being back home has been uncanny as such, but it illustrates my feelings rather well. You can be afraid and terrified in a completely new and unfamiliar situation, but you can only experience the uncanny as long as something in that situation is well-known to you. It goes back to the childhood fear that everyone in your family is a monster and wearing a mask - it's a shift from somewhere you feel safest in the world, to a place where you suddenly don't. And this can only happen if you feel safe to begin with. How does that connect to me right now? I'm trying to express that I do feel like I am right where I belong at the moment, but that it still feels different - and I can't quite put my finger on it yet. Then again, I'm not just returning from a two-week vacation in Spain, but from almost a year in London. Maybe I just haven't adjusted to the speed of traveling yet, and my mind is about to catch up with my body any second now.

Resources:
Alain de Botton, The Art of Travel (London: Penguin Group, 2014)
Sigmund Freud, The “Uncanny”. (First Published in Imago, Bd. V., 1919; reprinted in Sammlung, Fünfte Folge)