Notes from the Swiss Alps No. 10: Stage Three – Homesick as Fuck

There is a model of cultural adjustment I studied for a semester while earning my anthropology degree. It describes the stages people may move through when they live in another country.

I am not going to explain all the stages right now.

Whatever the official name, I am most certainly in the stage I am calling: homesick as fuck.

Sometimes I can barely see the reality of my life here because my inner eye is flooded with California. Memories appear so vividly that they feel less like thoughts and more like places I could step into.

I see the gray-blue fog making its way over the golden hills. I can feel the air shift as the coolness rolls in from the ocean. I see myself floating above the land, soaring through the redwoods. I feel the heat of a summer day, the taste of watermelon, bare feet on grass still wet from the sprinklers.

I can see the wandering coastline as it travels north toward Oregon and eventually Washington, vast and wild all the way. I see morning dew resting on leaves like tiny crystal balls. I hear the trees sway and knock against one another, making that strange squeaking sound in the wind.

It is the sounds I miss as much as the landscape.

The voices of people I know and love. The ocean. Birds outside the window. Even the fog rolling over the coastal hills seemed to make a song I could hear in the wind.

I miss the sounds of who I was there.

My full expression.

I feel my body connected to that land, that lifestyle and that particular way of being. I cannot disconnect from it. I do not ever want to. I love it so much.

I miss the people too. My community—the community I think I took for granted because I did not realize how strong it was until I left.

There, I knew where I liked to buy groceries, which road I would take to the coast and where I could walk alone with the waves. I knew the people I would probably run into and the ones I might not see for months but still felt connected to. I knew how to pump gas (yes, it is different here in the village), how to make small talk and how people spoke about work. I understood the invisible choreography of daily life.

Here, everything is different. The language. The food. The landscape. The lifestyle. The way people communicate and the way community works. I am starting over in the smallest, strangest ways: learning where I like to shop, which trails feel like mine, what I enjoy doing on a day off and what time I like to be home.

I miss my work. I really miss the meaningful work I was building in California. I was on a roll. I had spent years becoming known, creating relationships and trusting my own way of working. Then I moved, and I did not simply transfer that life to another address. I had to begin again in an entirely different culture and an entirely different language.

This is the part of moving abroad that photographs cannot explain.

A photograph can show the snow-covered mountains outside my window. It cannot show you the ache of no longer knowing how to be yourself in public. It cannot show you what it feels like to have humor, intelligence and stories alive inside you while possessing the spoken vocabulary of a small child. It cannot show you the grief of becoming quieter and less visible in rooms where no one has done anything wrong.

My voice has changed here.

I choose simpler words. I leave parts of myself out because I do not know how to translate them. I listen more than I speak. Sometimes I feel so tired from trying to understand and be understood that I stop wanting to say anything at all.

I have even stopped singing as much. Songs used to come to me. Lately, there has been more silence.

Maybe that silence is not empty. Maybe something in me has gone underground to listen, gather and become something new. But if I am honest, it has also been painful and frightening. My voice has always been one of the ways I know myself. When I cannot find it, I do not always know where I am either.

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Recently, my husband, my mom and I went to Lugano, where we met my dear friend Ann and her husband. Ann and I shared a massage room—and so much of our lives and work—for somewhere between eight and ten years.

Being with them felt like an exhale.

For a few days, I did not have to explain where I came from or translate my humor before speaking. We shared old stories and laughed until we cried. I could be an American tourist with people who understood the references, the rhythm of my voice and the person I had been before this enormous change.

My mother has, quite literally, known me my whole life. Ann has known me across many versions of it. There was something deeply regulating about being with people who did not need me to establish who I was before we could begin.

Then I returned to the Alps and felt the sadness rush back in.

The contrast made everything sharper. It reminded me of how much energy it takes to build a life from the beginning—and how much I miss being known without having to work so hard to be understood.

I knew this stage could come. I studied it. I can name it, contextualize it and intellectually understand it.

And still, I have to go through it.

Knowledge does not exempt us from transition. Sometimes it only gives the pain a name.

I have felt stuck in a dark place, alone and sad, grieving a life and a person I used to be. Part of me does not want to let that person go. I want to keep California within and around me forever. I am afraid that if I fully root here, I will betray the home that made me—as ridiculous as that may sound.

But home is home. It does not stop mattering because you crossed an ocean or married someone from somewhere else. Loving a new place does not erase the old one, and missing the old one does not mean the new life is a mistake.

As I search for familiar things to ground me here, I keep discovering that the landscapes are not as separate as they first appeared. In winter, the snow became a sea of water. The timing is different, but the elements are not wrong. The mountains hold weather like the coast once did. The forests offer solitude. The wind still moves through trees. The sun still changes everything when it returns.

And little do I know, I am already making memories here.

There are walks, kitchens, faces, sounds and ordinary afternoons being stored inside me right now. Perhaps one day I will be somewhere else and suddenly ache for the exact way the light crossed these mountains. Perhaps I will miss the cowbells, the silence after snow and the small road winding down into the valley.

That is the irony: we often do not recognize a life becoming precious while we are still living it.

How long do you have to stay in a place before it truly feels like home?

I still do not know.

Maybe home is not a title one place wins. Maybe it is not a competition between the life before and the life now. Maybe the heart is capable of holding more than one landscape without forcing either of them to disappear.

And maybe the voice changes too—not because it has been lost, but because it is learning how to belong to more than one life.

For now, California remains alive inside me. And here, slowly, almost too quietly for me to notice, another home may be forming around it.

With love from the Swiss Alps,
Bridgette Joy