Heimweh

It’s been two-and-a-half months since our last blog post. To be completely transparent, this experience it’s not been easy on either of us. I had fully planned on making a Thanksgiving-related blog post, actually. I didn’t think it was going to be a big deal, just another blog post. As I was writing it, however, I quickly realized that it was going to be far from a easy. It forced me to bring thoughts and emotions to the surface that I didn’t really know I had been supressing as they built up over the three months we had been here at the time. My breaking point was seeing all these holiday plans being made on social media and in group chats and knowing that, for the first time in my life, I wasn’t going to be able to be a part of any of it. The complete irony of me taking for granted the fact that Thanksgiving dinner with my family was always a constant in my life up until now hit me like a truck. I had a lot I wanted to say in that post, but I simply couldn’t continue writing because of the emotional weight. Here is the very ending of my unfinished draft:

My parents sent us a care package full of comforts from home recently. I didn’t realize until I was eating the first box of mac and cheese I’d had in months how much I missed it. Afterward, I jokingly tweeted, “You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone or they don’t sell it in your country.”

While it was mostly a joke, it did make me think: Aside from the mac and cheese, cookie dough, alfredo sauce, four-pound tub of peanut butter and everything else my parents sent us, what else from home do I not give the appreciation it deserves? The timing of this post is coincidental with an upcoming American tradition that I ironically had been taking for granted. Every year for as long as I can remember, my family made our rounds from my Dad’s side to my Mom’s side to celebrate Thanksgiving with everyone. Thanksgiving with my family has been a constant for my entire life and for the first time, I don’t get to celebrate it with them.

All I can really do is watch from 5,000 miles away as the tradition carries on without me.

Here in Germany, November 28, 2019 is just another Thursday. To me, however, it will be different. I will remember to slow down and appreciate my incredibly loving and supportive family, my amazing, beautiful wife, my friends, my coworkers and everything else I’ve been blessed with and will come home with a newfound appreciation for. I hope for you, Thanksgiving this year will be different too and not just another family dinner you have to go to.

It was through tears that I typed those three short paragraphs. I closed my laptop and I sunk in to the deepest depression of my life. I longed to be home.

Heimweh.

We’ve lived in Germany for five months now. I think people consider culture shock as something that takes place upon arrival, and while that’s partially true, I think the initial shock is mostly due to trying to get around and figure things out. In my experience, that feeling goes away pretty quickly. The real culture shock for me was a slow burn that goes mostly unnoticed and slowly crescendos up to about the two- to three-month mark when I started to realize I was almost always dejected. This is when I wrote that Thanksgiving draft, and this is when I was really shaken by culture shock.

It’s freezing at night because we have to turn our heat off after a certain time.

It’s difficult to cook because I don’t have the kitchen appliances and tools I’m used to, leading to lazy and unhealthy eating habits.

It’s hard to find ingredients because I have to stand in the store on my phone trying to translate everything.

It’s hard to get comfortable because our furniture is incredibly limited and we don’t have the money to buy anything comfortable.

We have to Google everything we throw away to see which of the five trash receptacles it’s supposed to go in.

We have to take an embarrassing 15-minute walk with a couple bags of trash in-hand every two weeks to the nearest yellow dumpster because the trash cans in front of our apartment are only for certain types of trash.

We don’t have a car or a bike and the public transportation in our small town is more of a hassle than it’s worth.

It’s hard to repair anything because the nearest hardware store is a very long walk to get there and back.

I can’t communicate with anyone because I don’t speak German.

The list goes on.

All these things compounded and took a huge toll on Johnna’s and my mental health. I just wanted to go home. I just wanted to live life, not having to plan my every move out and I wanted simple tasks like going to the grocery store to be like normal again.

Well, one or two mental breakdowns and some FaceTime calls later and, thanks to Johnna’s mom, we have found ourselves a flight back home for Christmas. Even the thought of returning home for two weeks was enough to lift our spirits higher than they had been in a long time.

At the time, I don’t think we realized the extent to which going home for just a short two weeks would help us. We saw friends and family who we missed dearly, ate at all our favorite restaurants, relaxed, talked about our experiences, gave out Christmas presents we brought back from the Christmas markets and just generally had a wonderful time. We really soaked in the love, support and excitement everyone had for us. We were home.

The thought of returning to Germany lingered in my mind as the two weeks progressed. I struggled a lot with this thought. Even though I knew I had to, I didn’t want to go back. I’d experienced enough of Germany and now I was back home where I could function like I’m used to. To my surprise, however, the more I got used to being home for this break, the more excited I was to go back. It wasn’t clear to me why I was excited to go back knowing how low I was when we left, but suddenly I had a renewed outlook on the whole situation and I wasn’t going to fight it.

Ever since we originally arrived in Germany in September, we have been treating our apartment almost like we are staying in someone else’s house temporarily. We figured since we were only here for a relatively short time, why bother settling down too much? When we returned from our Christmas break, we quickly changed a lot of things about the way we were living. It became clear to us that the main reason we longed so much for home is because we hadn’t made a home for ourselves here. We treated our time here like we were along for a ride, not like we were the ones driving.

Despite our financial struggles, we now make sure to prioritize our mental health and go out of our way to do things that help us dig our roots deeper here. Even simple things like rearranging the furniture from how it was when we arrived gives us the freedom to call our apartment a home. We have both enrolled in German courses, we take weekend trips to new cities, we force ourselves to get out every day, we make an effort to walk a little bit further to buy higher quality food. I’ve even planted a small cullinary herb garden in our windowsill. We still struggle with some of the cultural quirks, but we are continually working to embrace those.

We’ve only been back from Christmas break for a month-and-a-half, but our attitudes have fundamentally changed from when we first arrived, and I’m optimistic about the rest of our time here. Of course, none of this is to say we don’t consider the United States home anymore. We still miss our families and friends greatly and can’t wait to see them again. But at least for the next five months, Germany is our home and we are going to embrace that fact until it’s time for us to leave.

-Kyer Lasswell