On Becoming: I Don’t Think I Can Go Back to Normal
There’s something I’ve been circling lately, not quite ready to say out loud—but not able to ignore anymore.
I don’t think I can go back to what used to feel normal.
I want to say this carefully, because I loved my life before this. Truly. Where I came from shaped me in the best ways. I was held there. Known there. Surrounded by people who loved me deeply and consistently. That life mattered, and it still does. It’s the reason I am who I am today.
I don’t carry regret about it. I carry gratitude.
But something has shifted here, quietly, and now I can’t unfeel it.
I notice it most when I talk to my mom. In the pauses. In the way I answer questions about the future a little more slowly than I used to. In how often I say, “I don’t know yet,” and mean it—not as uncertainty, but as honesty. I think she hears it, even when I don’t explain it all the way.
Living here has stretched me in ways that don’t announce themselves. There wasn’t a single moment where everything cracked open and rearranged itself. It’s been slower than that. Subtler. Like realizing one day that your inner world has expanded beyond the life it used to fit inside.
I used to think fulfillment would feel like certainty. Like clarity. Like arriving at a version of life that finally made sense on paper.
Now, it feels quieter than that.
Now it feels like curiosity. Like motion. Like wanting to keep learning—not because something is missing, but because something is awake.
There’s a version of me who existed before this experience who needed proximity, reassurance, familiarity. She wasn’t wrong or small—she was loved. She had roots. She had rhythm. And I don’t want to lose her. I never want to dismiss the life that raised me or the people who made me feel safe enough to become anything at all.
But I don’t think I can be only her anymore.
Living here has taught me how to trust myself in unfamiliar places. How to sit with uncertainty without immediately trying to resolve it. How to let days be quiet and still feel full.
And once you learn that, it changes what you want.
It makes the idea of returning to a life that never asks you to stretch feel… incomplete. Not wrong. Just finished.
What complicates this is that I’m not done here. I still have two more years to learn and grow in this place. Two more years of language and community and mistakes and small victories. Two more years of becoming someone I couldn’t have imagined before I left.
And still, the question keeps surfacing.
Will that be it?
Not in an ungrateful way. Not in a restless, always-reaching way. Just honestly.
Will this chapter—this depth, this expansion, this way of living—be the fullest version of it? Or has this experience opened something in me that will keep asking for more adventure, more learning, more becoming long after I leave?
I don’t know the answer yet.
I only know that I’ve felt what it’s like to live beyond the edges of what I once thought was enough—and I can’t unknow that feeling now.
Where I came from will always be home. It will always matter. It will always live inside me.
But part of me knows I’m not finished learning how big my life can be.
And maybe the most honest thing I can say right now is that I’m willing to follow that question—wherever it leads—without rushing to answer it.
With heart,
