I spent six months abroad after retiring—and these 10 differences are why coming home felt more disorienting than leaving

Nobody warned me about coming home.

Everyone had opinions about the going:

My friends thought it was brave.

My children thought it was slightly alarming.

My doctor asked sensible questions about medications, travel insurance, and whether I’d looked into the healthcare situation wherever I was going.

The neighbors wanted to know if I was selling the house.

I wasn’t selling the house. I was going to Portugal for six months because I’d retired eight months earlier and discovered, in the particular silence that follows a decades-long career, that I didn’t know what I was supposed to do with myself.

The structure that had organized my days for thirty-two years had simply stopped, and the life I’d imagined waiting on the other side of it—the reading, the leisure, the finally having time—turned out to require more scaffolding than I’d anticipated.

So I went.

Rented a small apartment in Lisbon, shipped myself and two suitcases and no particular plan, and spent six months figuring out, slowly and not without difficulty, how to be someone whose days belonged entirely to herself.

I did figure it out. That’s the part everyone wants to hear about. The cobblestones and the light and the slow coffee and the feeling, somewhere around month three, of having genuinely settled into something.

What nobody asked about was the return.

Coming home after six months felt stranger than leaving had. The city I’d lived in for twenty years looked the same and felt subtly, persistently wrong—like a song played in the right key but at the wrong tempo.

I kept waiting for the disorientation to lift, the way jetlag lifts. It didn’t quite. What I had, instead, was a growing clarity about what had shifted—not in the place I’d come home to, but in me.

Here are ten of those shifts.

1. I’d stopped filling silence with noise

Somewhere in the first month abroad, I’d turned the television off and not turned it back on.

Not as a decision—more as a drift. The apartment was small and the evenings were warm and there were sounds outside the window that were more interesting than anything on a screen.

By the time I came home, I’d been living in near-quiet for months, and the ambient noise of my ordinary domestic life—the television on in the background, the radio in the kitchen, the constant low-level hum of electronic things—felt not like comfort but like weather I’d forgotten I used to need.

Home felt loud in a way I couldn’t explain to anyone without sounding like I’d joined a cult.

2. I’d learned to spend time without spending money

Abroad, I’d been careful with money by necessity, and the carefulness had produced something unexpected: I’d gotten very good at being somewhere without consuming anything.

The bench in the square. The walk that had no destination. The afternoon in the market that didn’t result in a purchase.

At home, leisure had always had a kind of commercial shape—the restaurant, the shop, the outing that involved a transaction. Coming back, I noticed how much of my social life was organized around spending, and how little I’d actually missed that structure when I’d been living without it.

3. I’d stopped being in a hurry

Portugal had taught me, patiently and against my considerable resistance, that not everything needed to happen at the speed I’d been operating at for three decades.

The slower lunch.

The meandering errand.

The conversation that continued past the point where I’d have previously invented a reason to leave.

I’d absorbed a different relationship to time—not laziness, something more deliberate than that—and coming home meant re-entering an environment where hurry was ambient, where efficiency was virtue, where the question ” What are you doing this weekend?” was really asking “how are you using your time productively?”

I’d stopped finding that question interesting. I wasn’t sure how to explain that without sounding like a person who’d been on holiday and confused it for a personality.

4. I’d gotten used to not being known

For six months, nobody had a prior version of me to compare me to.

The neighbors didn’t know that I’d spent thirty-two years in a particular professional role.

The woman at the café didn’t know what my children’s names were or that I’d been married for a long time or that I had a specific way of doing things that everyone in my ordinary life knew to expect.

I was simply a person—undefined, unpresupposed, not yet accumulated into a fixed identity.

Coming home meant stepping back into the life-sized outline of myself that everyone else had been maintaining in my absence. It fit. It was also slightly a cage.

5. I’d developed opinions I wasn’t sure I was allowed to have

Six months of living differently had produced a quiet but definite set of preferences about how I wanted to spend the remaining years of my life.

Smaller. Slower. With more space in the calendar and less obligation to the version of productivity I’d spent decades honoring. More walking. Less explaining myself. More of the feeling I’d had in month three—of being inside my own life rather than executing it.

These opinions were inconvenient. They didn’t map neatly onto the life I’d returned to, the expectations of the people in it, the sense that now that I was home, things could get back to normal. I wasn’t sure I wanted normal. I wasn’t sure how to say that without alarming anyone.

6. I’d stopped performing contentment

Abroad, when something was hard, I let it be hard.

There was nobody to reassure, nobody whose anxiety about my well-being required management.

I could be confused or lonely or uncertain without converting it into something more digestible for an audience.

Coming home meant re-entering a web of people who loved me and wanted me to be fine, and who needed, in some cases, for me to tell them that I was fine in order for them to be fine. The performance of contentment—that specific translation of interior experience into something palatable for the people around you—had atrophied in my absence. I hadn’t missed it. Its return was effortful.

I remember the first party after I got back. Someone asked how it had been, and I gave the version that would land—the aperitifs, the pastries, the light. The fuller answer was sitting somewhere just behind that one, waiting for a question that didn’t come.

7. I’d made peace with my own company

Before I left, I’d have described myself as someone who liked people, which was true, but the subtext was that I’d needed people in a way I hadn’t fully examined—needed the social calendar, the plans, the fullness of a week with things in it, to feel that the days were adequate.

Six months of being largely alone had quietly dismantled this. I’d discovered that I was, in fact, good company for myself. That the hours alone weren’t something to get through, but something that could be genuinely inhabited. Coming home, I found I had a higher tolerance for empty evenings than I’d had before—and a lower tolerance for social engagements I’d agreed to out of habit rather than desire.

This required some renegotiation that I was still working out.

8. I’d stopped checking things constantly

The phone. The news. The ambient awareness of what was happening in the world and in my social circle that I’d maintained, without noticing, as a kind of continuous background activity.

Abroad, the news had felt genuinely remote. The things that were happening at home were happening at a distance that made them feel less immediately requiring of my attention.

I’d checked less, followed less, and discovered that the world had not, in fact, needed my ongoing monitoring to continue operating. Coming home, the pull to resubscribe to everything was immediate and strong. Resisting it took an effort that felt, embarrassingly, like effort.

9. I’d renegotiated my relationship with productivity

Thirty-two years of working had installed a deep and largely unexamined belief that the value of a day was related to what it produced.

Abroad, unmoored from structure and accountability, I’d been forced to find a different measure.

The walk that produced nothing but the walk itself. The afternoon that ended without anything to show for it. The slow accumulated sense that a day could be worth having without being worth reporting.

Coming home meant re-entering a social world where the question, “what have you been up to?” was still really asking “what have you accomplished?”

I’d stopped having a good answer. I wasn’t sure I missed having one.

My daughter asked me the week I got back what my plan was now. She meant it kindly—she’s practical, she cares, she wanted to know I was okay. But I noticed something tighten in me at the question. The plan was the thing I’d been learning to live without.

Editor’s Note: This piece is part of our “As Told to Bolde” series where we share personal stories from individuals we have interviewed or surveyed. For more information on how we create content, please review our Editorial Policy.