empathy burnout

My feet struggle to remain grounded these days.

Sometimes the lives of the people I left behind feel strangely small. Not small in value — but small in horizon. It is the familiar insularity of an island: a world bound by sea, where hills slowly become mountains simply because nothing larger intrudes to put them into perspective. For many of my friends, this is the only bubble they have ever known.

There are those who regard me with a quiet unease. I suspect I make them uncomfortable; I suspect they resent me for living the life they might have wanted. I will always be the one who left and returned — the expatriate who came back carrying three years of elsewhere on her shoulders. The one whose stories taste faintly unfamiliar. They sit, listen, and sip their wine made from sour grapes. 

I hear people complain often about the country. About how suffocating it feels. About how they dream of leaving.And sometimes, perhaps too bluntly, I ask them why they never did.

Someone recently answered that question. They told me — with a hint of condescension — that they simply had too many ties here. Family. Friends. Work. Roots that run too deep to pull from the soil.

And me?

I suppose my life must look as though it were for rent.

These thoughts visit me only occasionally, usually in the quiet moments when memory has too much room to wander. People are entitled to their justifications. The stories we tell ourselves often become the only way we can live comfortably with our choices. I took the risk of leaving. Whether those three years will prove to have been a reward or merely a detour is something time will decide.

What I do know is that those years are difficult to explain to people who never left. Sometimes they attempt to translate my experiences into their own local frustrations. Sometimes they quietly decide that I have become snobbish.

I wish they would simply listen.

There are certain things only other expatriates understand — the peculiar blend of exhilaration and loneliness that came with building a life somewhere foreign.

As time passes, I find myself speaking about those years less and less. The stories seem to land nowhere. Nowadays, I am grieving quietly. 

Before I left, at twenty-five, I learned how to ride a bicycle. Every morning, I rode it to university. The wheels rattled when they hit the cobbled streets, and the narrow bike-seat left calluses on my skin. I remember those small discomforts fondly now; they were new to me then, little marks of a life beginning to expand.

In the evenings, I walked beside the river. I would sit on the grass and watch clouds drift slowly across the sky. There, I could hear the quiet. Sometimes, I ran my hands through lavender bushes until the scent clung to my jacket for the rest of the evening.

And somewhere along the way, I fell in love in a foreign language. 

For that alone, I will always be grateful.

My mind was rarely cluttered in those days.

Later, came the faster rhythm of working life. In a brand new country. Each morning I walked through the cool mist toward the tram. I loved watching droplets gather on leaves and fall quietly to the ground. Sometimes, my path led me through a nearby cemetery. I would pause there, studying the elaborate tombstones — Florentine marble imported even for the dead.

A willow tree stood nearby, and when it rained, I sometimes took shelter beneath it and watched as its branches swayed in the wind. Each autumn, its leaves turned amber and rust — drifting slowly to the ground. And then I would wait, patiently, for their return in spring.

Here, people complain when it rains. They complain about the grey skies. Yet my body had grown accustomed to weeks without seeing the sun. When it does not rain, people complain about drought. When the heat arrives, they complain about the heat; when the air cools, they complain about the humidity. 

They do not know what it means to return somewhere after being away long enough to see it clearly again — to suddenly appreciate the things that once felt ordinary.

They never left long enough to learn that.

I lived through seasons. Real seasons — the slow procession of autumn into winter, the hesitant unfolding of spring and then, the burst of summer. And with each passing one, parts of the person I had once been quietly slipped away.

Now, I miss the small things. 

The rickety wooden staircase that creaked beneath my feet as I climbed toward my apartment. The cheap beer. The quiet amusement of sitting on the tram and inventing stories about the strangers seated beside me. I miss the people who taught me how to live in the present instead of drowning in details. The friends who made foreign places feel like home.

I miss sitting with them in a small bistro overlooking the old city resting in its valley, talking about nothing and everything all at once on soft spring evenings.

And as I write this now, a tear slips quietly down my cheek.

Does anyone know what it feels like to return home and discover that no one quite understands you anymore? To feel emotionally displaced — untethered from both the place you left and the place you returned to? 

Perhaps this is what emotional exhaustion feels like.

Over those years I gave so much of myself — to friendships, to love, to departures and goodbyes — that there is very little left in reserve. My reservoir needs time to refill.

The truth, when it arrives, is disarmingly simple: the world does not stop spinning for anyone. Life moves forward whether we are ready for it or not. I will not sit on my own grievances to suit another's convenience. 

So I am learning something new now.

I am learning to live in the moment again. 

And this time, I am choosing myself.