Tag: Homesickness

Don’t Blink or You’ll Miss It

by pennypostcard • April 25, 2023 • 0 Comments

While serving an overseas tour, you will have unusual experiences and adventures unique to your country or region of assignment. In the meantime, life continues for your family and friends half a world away in the United States. And once you come home to serve a domestic tour, you too get to enjoy all those people, places, and conveniences you missed. You soon settle into the familiar and relish in all that’s just easier. But every once in a while, you might get a bittersweet pang of FOMO thinking about the novelties you’d be enjoying if you were elsewhere. Or, homesickness may creep in for a faraway land that’s no longer your home.

My unsolicited advice, wherever you are, is to avoid looking across the fence to see if the grass is greener on the other side. There may not even be grass, so incomparable are the chapters of our lives one to another, and so starkly delineated by overseas moves. I think the trick is to enjoy each experience maximally for whatever it is before it’s time to change everything – house, job, cars, life – once again.

Foreign Service, U.S.

Go West, Part III: Social Media is Disconnecting Us All

by pennypostcard • August 31, 2022 • 3 Comments

After driving cross-country like an arrow in under four days, I arrived in my hometown on the last day of May and sat at my friend T’s grave. I then spent half of June teleworking from my mom’s house in California, and later made my way up to Washington state to see my dad and stepmom before turning the wheel back east towards Virginia and home.

I didn’t take much leave during my three-week road trip west. The deal I’d hastily cut with my office had been to work remotely from California so I could spend time decompressing with family while not leaving our team in the lurch. I did, however, voluntarily and consistently work on east coast time. I aligned my schedule with my colleagues’ by signing on at 5:00 a.m. west coast time, taking my lunch after my family arose for breakfast, and signing off by 2:00 p.m. Thus I was free relatively early each day to enjoy some sun and do whatever else I wanted. That mainly involved spending time with family and old friends, sitting quietly in the cemetery, or visiting places I had memories with T where I needed to be alone and process my grief.

Foreign Service, Travel, U.S.

Go West, Part II

by pennypostcard • July 2, 2022 • 6 Comments

Last August, I left Ciudad Juárez on vacation and drove across the deserts of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and Nevada to visit my family in California for the first time in about two years, logging 1,279 solo miles in just under 36 total hours. Five weeks ago in late May, I also set off west; the same destination in mind, but this time from Virginia. It was the biggest solo road trip I’d ever embarked upon, and I’d done so with less than 12 hours’ planning, deciding around 8pm on the Friday evening preceding Memorial Day weekend to leave Saturday morning and leverage three days off in a row to get out to California where I could continue remote working as I do here at home.

I was in a state of acute grief at having learned I’d lost an old friend and ex-boyfriend, T, to suicide and that – unbeknownst to me until late April – his family had buried him privately in our hometown in January. I was distracted, upset, unproductive. I needed answers, I needed to say goodbye, I needed to see my family.

I let my mom know I was coming. In the Foreign Service lifestyle, this would not always be possible. Fortunately, we are still in a pandemic and remote working up to 80% of the time, we are on a domestic tour, my car had recently been serviced, and I was on top of my laundry and bills. A few thousand miles could not faze me. I made a packing list and executed it. Barely four days later, I rolled up in front of my mom’s house with an extra 2,723 miles on the Volkswagen’s odometer and dirt from 13 different states on the undercarriage.

Foreign Service, Travel, U.S.

Motherland Calling

by pennypostcard • October 14, 2021 • 2 Comments

If the first two days of my August road trip north and west carried a “fury road” theme as I mad maxed it across the deserts of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and Nevada, putting 1,279 miles between me and Ciudad Juárez in less than 37 hours, the following two weeks held a sweeter and more nostalgic appeal. From the pine tree-studded Sierra Nevada foothills of northern California to the beaches of San Diego, my first trip to my home state in just over two years was a time to slow down and do as little as I wanted. More importantly, I got a chance to spend a little time with some of the people who I love the most and who I hadn’t seen in far too long.

Australia, Foreign Service

What I Miss (and Don’t Miss) About Australia

by pennypostcard • October 27, 2019 • 2 Comments

Three months ago, during the last week of July, my diplomatic posting to Australia was ending and my colleagues threw me a going-away lunch. Over Indian food, one colleague asked what I would miss about serving in Canberra and what I was looking forward to in the United States. Funny he should have asked, because at that time, what I was going to miss about Australia was a topic I had been thinking about a lot. I’d actually been sketching a blog post outline about it for several weeks!

However, life happened and I didn’t manage to finish writing and editing the post before I left, or even during the past several weeks since we returned to the U.S. I started thinking about it again when I saw the post sitting in my drafts folder, and during my recent Spanish evaluation, when I was asked to compare and contrast life in the U.S. with life in Australia.

So here are my thoughts, in no particular order, about what I miss (and don’t miss) about living in Australia.

Balkans, Foreign Service, Peace Corps

Postcard Flashback: Peace Corps Volunteer Lessons in Resiliency

by pennypostcard • November 3, 2018 • 5 Comments

As the end of the Foreign Service bidding cycle came to a close, all of the waiting and ambiguity I thought would end upon that long hoped-for handshake instead deepened into more waiting, frustration, bureaucratic entanglements, and medical clearance issues. I am working on it and hopefully will be able to announce our onward assignment in the coming weeks. In the meantime, the feeling of getting very close to a good outcome, only to keep getting further away while jumping over unexpected obstacles in my path has been dogging me. Someday I will tell that story.

Today, I’ll tell a different story in the same vein, about a day in March 2003 during my first couple of months as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Republic of Macedonia. Originally entitled, “All For a List,” I wrote this piece about trying so hard to do something simple and being foiled, and foiled, and foiled some more. I silently raged against the machine, I almost lost patience, I almost let it get my goat. When the most straightforward situations devolve into total clown shows, it is the ability to laugh when you want to cry that keeps you resilient. I meet much bigger challenges more easily now, but for me that day in 2003 still marks how far I’ve since come in learning patience, thinking on my feet, and innovating on the fly. It is a snapshot in time of learning to build resiliency, and finding the calmest path to the destination you want. Don’t miss the scenery along the way!

Balkans, Peace Corps

Postcard Flashback: Letters Home During Peace Corps

by pennypostcard • July 30, 2018 • 3 Comments

Between November 2002 and August 2004, I served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Republic of Macedonia doing environmental education and management. At that stage of my life, I was in my mid-20s, single, and a recent San Diego State University graduate who hadn’t seen much of the world outside of California, Nevada, and northern Mexico. Every few years, I take a look back at some of the emails and letters I sent to friends and family during that time. Even though some of the writing is spectacularly convoluted and would have benefited from thorough editing, I do see glimpses within of the person I would become. Some of the letters, while not a complete perspective on my service, are also a heartwarming reminder for me of my young resiliency, hope, and the struggles I had in adapting to my new home. Although some days I succeeded better than others, the prevailing legacy of that time was an openness to seeing life through others’ eyes. I’m sharing a few excerpts of those letters home here.

Foreign Service

Your Questions Answered, Volume II

by pennypostcard • June 24, 2018 • 7 Comments

At least a couple of times a month, the Collecting Postcards blog receives questions via social media or email. Although I always answer readers directly, I have also wanted to address repeat questions more broadly by turning them into blog topics. I tried this in August 2015 with a feature I called “Your Questions Answered,” but lapsed in keeping it going. I’m going to try to relaunch it, so here are a few recent questions I’ve received: about access to American “stuff” while overseas, coping with distance from loved ones, making home wherever you lay your head, and balancing official duties with personal beliefs. Go ahead, ask a diplomat!

Foreign Service, Uzbekistan

Not Homesick

by pennypostcard • February 8, 2016 • 2 Comments

A couple of weeks ago, my husband and I talked about whether or not we were homesick, and what, if anything, we missed from the United States (the “who” being a given).

It started when I made a comment about missing something I wished I could have (which usually goes hand-in-hand with an inadvertent failure to be grateful for the present and whatever’s right in front of me). I don’t remember now whether it was avocados, or Ambar, our favorite Balkan restaurant that we frequented on Capitol Hill during our years in DC, or something else. But it was something I was surprised to learn my husband had really enjoyed at the time but didn’t much miss.

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