Fourteen months in. Last week I found myself genuinely dreading packing, and I have started picking places based on which flight is least annoying rather than where I want to be. Nothing is wrong. Work is fine, money is fine, I am not lonely exactly. It just stopped feeling like anything. And I feel ridiculous complaining about it because this is what I spent two years planning for.
On the feeling ridiculous part: you spent two years planning a thing, you did it, and now you have new information about what you want. That is not a failure of gratitude, it is the normal result of trying something. Nobody is keeping score, and the people who would be smug about it are not going to hear about it either way. Plenty of us have gone home for a season and come back out later, and the second run is usually better because you know what you actually want out of it.
Went back for eight months to be near family and it was the right call. The version of me that came back had much clearer reasons for going.
Anchors, in order of how much they helped me: one weekly thing at a fixed time with the same people, the same breakfast, a training plan with dates in it, and one call every Sunday with someone at home. Those four make any city feel like somewhere you live rather than somewhere you are.
Book a return ticket to somewhere familiar for a month. Having a date on the calendar took a surprising amount of pressure off me even before I flew.
Also check the boring stuff. Fourteen months of bad chairs, restaurant food, broken sleep and no consistent exercise will produce exactly this flatness in someone with nothing else wrong. It is worth ruling out before you conclude anything about the lifestyle.
@wanderport · 2w ago · 3 replies
Month nine to fifteen is the wall. It is common enough that I now warn people about it in advance, and almost nobody believes me until it happens to them.
What it usually means is not that you want to go home, it is that novelty has stopped paying for itself. Early on the newness of a place is a reward in its own right. After a year your brain has recalibrated, a new city is just a city, and now you are paying full price in logistics for something that no longer feels like a treat.
The fix that works for most people is slowing down rather than stopping. Pick somewhere you already liked, take a six month lease, unpack completely, and put one thing in your week that repeats: a class, a team, a Tuesday. The dread lifts within a month or so. Several people I know made an expensive decision to quit entirely at month thirteen, and what they actually needed was to stop moving for a while.
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@first_dollar_fi · 2w ago
Unpack completely is the underrated instruction. Living out of a bag for a year keeps you in transit mentally even when you are staying put.
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@leafspot_lia · 2w ago
I have not fully unpacked in fourteen months. Not once. That landed harder than I expected.
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