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+ Over the last six or seven years living abroad in the faraway place of
+ Munich, Germany, I’ve often wondered when, or even whether, I might return
+ home to Melbourne, Australia. Even though I never spent much time
+ contemplating my distant future, my mother certainly didn’t let me forget
+ that she wished to have me back at home sooner rather than later. I'd
+ listen to her talk in absolutes every return visit, “when you’re back
+ next year…,” and so on. I shrugged it off as just motherly love. I'm
+ in Germany, Mum, and I’m staying here for now!
+
+ Despite this, the thought in the back of my mind that this overseas
+ journey would in all likelihood be ephemeral proved to be a constant
+ burden. Wherever I went, whichever decision I made, the immense doubt
+ haunted me. Before the COVID pandemic, I had originally planned
+ to study my Master’s, probably work a couple of years at a local
+ company “in the industry”, and then return home ideally feeling fulfilled and
+ satisfied. Like I had earnt some kind of imaginary certificate of
+ intercultural aptitude. Secretly however, I imagined falling in love
+ with a beautiful German girl and living in the idyllic Bavarian
+ countryside, happily ever after, even if I was unwilling to admit it
+ even to myself.
+
+ But given the retreat of pandemic-related restrictions and regulations was
+ so gradual, as were too the many changes in my life circumstances
+ in-between, it never seemed like quite the right time to draw a line in the
+ sand. It would seem I became the frog in boiling water.
+
+ Finally, maybe around late 2023, things seemed to have settled. I chose to
+ move into my own apartment, after my roommate moved in with his
+ girlfriend. It became clear to me that I would soon have to give serious
+ thought as to whether I wanted to return home, or if I wanted to seriously
+ commit to “being German.” The weight I was carrying was growing
+ heavier, and somehow I knew this was slowing me down. I just didn't
+ realise how much exactly.
+
+ In the first few years here, sure—it never made much sense to paint my
+ student dorm room or invest in expensive furniture, even once I began earning a
+ full-time salary—I figured I probably wouldn’t be here much longer,
+ anyway. But as the years went by and the dorm rooms became my own rental
+ apartments, I could feel the desire to invest in long-term commitments grow
+ stronger within me. Actually bringing any of them to fruition, on the other
+ hand, seemed impossible. I could hardly bring myself to buy a
+ dishwasher for the longest time: moving countries could have always been
+ right around the corner, so I had better not waste the money and effort.
+
+ Never knowing when I was going to leave, I froze in the face of more
+ important decisions, even ones that might have promised to greatly improve
+ my quality of life, and that seemed frankly banal to outsiders. It plagued
+ the back of my mind when searching for the motivation to meet people or go
+ on dates. What if I eventually want to go home? Will she lose interest in me
+ because I’m a flight risk?
+
+ Whenever I would meet someone in my daily life, they would inevitably
+ ask me whether I would like to stay in Germany forever or if I plan to
+ move home at some stage. Over the years, I learnt to come with
+ pre-prepared answers that suggested I was comfortable with my
+ open-ended life abroad. But I wasn’t. I felt trapped, like I couldn’t
+ go anywhere. Like I couldn’t start any meaningful projects. I wanted to
+ take on so much more and feel resolute in each step. But I felt
+ suffocated by the idea that the rug would soon be pulled out from under
+ my feet.
+
+ I did however eventually start voicing the idea that, as long as I
+ don’t meet anybody here that I come to love so much that I simply must
+ stay, it would be better for me to go home. That was the beginning of
+ the end, I suppose, but the thought was so limp in spirit that it
+ hardly made any difference in my life. Instead it was the perfect
+ excuse to remain undecided: at any moment, the love of my life could
+ waltz around the corner. Ironically, this straitjacket of indecision
+ all but prevented me from doing anything about my bachelorhood.
+
+ Things did improve; I grew adamant that I would break down old habits
+ that were once born of helplessness. I found it increasingly easier to
+ “just do things,” as the chronically online say, but there was an upper
+ limit to their magnitude. Such things as buying more expensive home
+ furnishings or making slightly more long-term commitments became easier
+ (think “one year” rather than “a couple of months”), but nonetheless I
+ stillfelt tremendously stuck.
+
+ In the summer of 2025, my parents visited and stayed with me for two
+ months, during which we went on many European trips alongside my daily
+ life in Munich. Afterwards, I joined them on the plane ride home and
+ visited Melbourne. This time, it was outside of the usual Christmas
+ holiday period so as to really get a sense of how life back home had
+ changed.
+
+ I stayed a month, bringing the total time spent with family and friends
+ to three months, which was a lot of time for me after having lived for
+ so long abroad. Alhoutgh I had visited for a month almost every year,
+ this time around felt a bit different. I felt like I was actually back
+ home, and not just peering through the window. Maybe it was the time of
+ year, maybe because of the high school reunion I attended, or maybe
+ even just due to how much time had passed since COVID. Whatever it was,
+ those three months made their mark. After saying our goodbyes at the
+ airport, I headed to stand in line at the first security checkpoint.
+ After turning the corner, I lost sight of my parents, and my heart
+ sank.
+
+ For the first time in seven years, something felt wrong. I didn’t want
+ to leave any more. I realised that my time in Munich was over. After
+ two years of deliberating over the minutiae of my life and where I
+ lived, the epiphany seemed to come in an instant. It was emotional.
+ There was no logical breakthrough. No intellectual victory. I was just
+ homesick. After six years, no less.
+
+ Once I arrived back in Munich, everything about this charming place
+ became grossly annoying overnight. The northern winter annoyed me. The
+ people annoyed me. My job annoyed me. My entire surroundings were so
+ fastidious that I couldn’t wait to get home. Even the German language
+ that has brought me so much joy to learn, to which I effortlessly
+ dedicated so much time and interest; even it became a nuisance. I
+ wanted my native tongue back. I wanted effortless freedom of expression
+ back. I was imprinted with a culture when I was younger and I just
+ wanted it back.
+
+ Paradoxically, though, I felt fully liberated all of a sudden. Free to
+ do whatever I wanted. Having made the decision to pack up and leave
+ filled me with such a profound sense of direction that everything else
+ was able to just slide into place, as if a circuit had been completed.
+
+ By forfeiting many potential futures for just one that I could count
+ on, the organisation of the rest of my life was able to spontaneously
+ emerge. I guess I always sensed this would happen, but I seriously
+ underestimated the ramifications. A cataclysmic domino effect resolved
+ a hierarchy of assumptions about who I was, where I was, and what I was
+ doing, running incredibly deep. Before, I was basically floundering.
+ Even though I could feel that I knew what feeling I wanted out of
+ life—and indeed I strove to work towards it&mash;I was
+ nonetheless totally directionless. And it was painful. Not so any more.
+
+ The irony of all this is that by making this decision, I suddenly feel
+ like I know what I’m doing here right now and can arrange the
+ coming months accordingly. I feel freer that ever to date people in
+ Germany and with even more intention than I did before. I feel like I
+ have permission to take on any domestic projects I feel like. Isn’t
+ that strange? I sure thought so. In all honesty I expected the opposite
+ outcome. But now there’s a timeline: I can see how it all fits into the
+ grand plan.
+
+ There are more reasons to move home, however, than just family and
+ friends, as important as they are to me. They were simply the more
+ obvious tip of the iceberg, as it were.
+
+ Trying to live in two cultures at once results in a kind of purgatory,
+ and I suppose I never quite committed to living in one or the other.
+ But over the last few years, especially upon contemplating the
+ physiological and psychological impact of learnt helplessness, it
+ became clear that there was a deep desire in me to self-actualise, and
+ that it should be given more serious attention. During my preteen and
+ early teen years, I was a prolific user of the Adobe suite, I loved to
+ draw, write stories, and produce music. I loved to make silly games and
+ build worlds with atmosphere. It was here where I was completely in my
+ element, and I sense deep within myself that I need to reprise these
+ pursuits. Alas, it would seem I can hardly find the time (or if I am
+ honest, the energy) to invest in them. I have mostly blamed this on my
+ day job, but it has become increasingly obvious that I’m mostly
+ being stifled simply by living alone in a foreign country.
+
+ The purpose of a culture is apparently to obviate the need to think
+ about what to do as much as possible so as to free up energy for more
+ niche specialisation. Having to think about how to greet somebody, or
+ what is appropriate to do in public versus in private, or even what
+ amount and what type of conversation is appropriate, and with
+ whom—these are all things that are imparted simply by virtue of
+ growing up in a particular culture. They are acquired in similar
+ fashion to language (and some might say that these two are indeed
+ exactly the same thing). If it weren’t for these effortless
+ assumptions, it might become an exhausting moment-by-moment decision
+ making process, in perpetuity. The broader cultural context can take
+ care of much of this, both in the aforementioned sense of traditions
+ and customs as well as by making use of particular industrial
+ specialisations, such as manufacturing and the provision of services
+ and application of expertise. This way, you can focus on you, so you
+ can “relax into complexity”.
+
+ The imprinting of childhood seems especially important. It's possible,
+ and certainly proven in the case of language acquisition, that children
+ growing up with multiple cultural contexts in parallel find the
+ context-switching relatively painless and easy, if not equally as easy
+ as the monoculturally reared child. These additional cultures are like
+ an extra sub-context within a single culture. Being “German” is, for
+ example, another social language, with its own grammar, akin to
+ attending church versus going to a bar. And it, too, has multiple
+ manifestations.
+
+ But I am not a child of Germany. Neither is German my native tongue. I
+ may have long been a C2 speaker, and indeed, I live my life basically
+ incognito unless I explicitly mention my background—no one really
+ notices I’m not from around here. Yet no matter how good my language
+ skills get, this mismatch still presents as an extra layer of
+ abstraction. For the programmers out there: I do not feel like I’m
+ running on “bare metal” like I do back home. The extra latency becomes
+ cumulatively exhausting. I’m running in an interpreter, playing life on
+ hard mode, when the opportunity to compile to machine code and switch
+ to normal mode (or even easy) is right at my fingertips.
+
+ I previously described my circumstances as a purgatory, and this is an
+ apt word to exemplify the cultural incongruencies. The word itself is
+ frequently used—but only in English speaking cultures—in a
+ looser sense to refer to a state of suffering that is almost always
+ temporary, before a type of finalising “decision” relieves oneself of
+ it. This is not so in other languages. Whilst the word and idea of a
+ purgatory do exist in German (Fegefeuer), they don’t in this
+ metaphorical sense. Many other types of analogies, turns of phrases,
+ and cultural metaphors used in everyday life don't neatly map to one
+ another (even though some do, thanks to the more remotely shared
+ cultural and linguistic history).
+
+ I’ve come to believe that you might have to fully relinquish one
+ cultural context for another in order to remove the extra cognitive
+ burden. That would entail essentially “giving up” Australia once and
+ for all to stay in Germany and focus on more specialised pursuits. Upon
+ reflection, I think I really did do this for a few years, whilst I was
+ still enthralled by the joy of learning a new language to proficiency,
+ but its novelty soon faded.
+
+ When I use my computer, I always have two keyboard layouts active,
+ depending on what I’m doing. One for writing German prose and
+ messaging, and another with my “native” layout for everything else. I
+ originally figured this two-pronged approach would make things easier,
+ but really, it's constant chaos. Forever having one foot in each door
+ is the same kind of chaos.
+
+ As such, it now seems obvious to me that I have to return to a single
+ keyboard layout and go home. If I want to “relax into complexity,” then
+ I must free up as much energy as possible, and in making this decision
+ I can feel another entanglement of helplessness slowly unravel.
+
+ And this time, it’s a big one.
+
+
+