Words of advice

TGL – “Where you are ain’t no good unless you can leave” – a sound bite from that ran in a rock song. It changed my life, but I wish I’d been warned.



The sing was Ministry’s Jesus built my hotrod, which featured the singer from Butthole Surfers doing this weird scat type line all through it. It was full of sound bites pulled from those 1950’s US flicks when the car became the symbol of youth freedom. If you wanted out of your backwater burg and to get away from Sheriff McGee who was always giving you grief, then you needed a set of wheels.



I had a set of wheels at home, but New Zealand doesn’t have any land borders and I’d driven the length and breadth of it countless times before I was 25. I wanted out. I wanted away. I wanted to see foreign lands, romance foreign girls and get a job that didn’t suck my soul out through my fingertips. The solution was simple. Trade the car for an airfare and get the hell out of dodge.



Nobody warned me of what I was getting myself into in this international life, especially by moving to South East Asia, which is about as chalk to my home cheese as you can really get. Nobody warned me that I would never be able to return home.



I’ve had this conversation a billion times in the (nigh on) five years I’ve been away. That may not sound long to some of you, but remember that it is more than long enough to ensure you won’t fit snug into that round hole of home should you choose to return.



So here I am offering my own two cents as a word of warning to anyone who may come across it. If you’re seriously contemplating living abroad, then be prepared to never quite return home. Your experiences and life are just that too far removed from those that stay, and I can sum this up with a simple story.



Last time I returned home, I went to see a friend of mine at his house. He signed up for the mortgage on the house with his girlfriend. He’s still there and she isn’t. I took over a bag full of photographs from my travels and my life in the three years since I’d seen him last. He didn’t even want to look at them, but rather wanted to hit the hot knives again and then show me the life he had made for himself in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (a game on the Playstation), which included “photos” of his girlfriend within the game.



I related this story to an older friend the other day, who agreed that few, if any, people at home made any effort to understand that you’d been away and would therefore be different. She said that, upon return, we have to spend a great deal of energy adapting ourselves to those who have stayed, talking about their new cars, about who has had babies and their mortgages, when we know their lives already.



It is a transient place I have chosen, and it doesn’t help that my friends constantly move away. Given that we live in such a small expat community (and show me a foreign community in any country that is not in some way insular) the emotional commitment to making new friends can sometimes be too frightening, and the loss of understanding with those we knew at home can be quite a shock to the system.



All I’m pointing to here is the notion that you might want to think about these aspects before judging home too harshly. By all means travel and living overseas is a wonderful growth experience. But perhaps try to keep more of a root down in your home town than I have.



Jon Frisby-De’ath for The Good Life