Reflecting after being back for a year

Yesterday was not a good day.

It was one of those days that makes you question everything you do and all of the decisions you've made.

I was left feeling inadequate and incapable, with no choices or options.

To make myself feel better (after getting myself some Starbucks and doing Yoga With Adriene's Yoga for when you're angry video), I started looking through my old photos.  That's when I realized that as of today, I have been back in the United States for one year.

I have always had mixed feeling about being back in the United States.  I wasn't ready for my adventures overseas to be over when I came back, but because of lots of reasons, the US was where I needed to go.  Honestly, I still don't feel completely re-patriated yet.  I no longer feel like an American (not that I ever really did), but I can't really consider myself anything else either.

Other than my family, no one here "gets" what it's like to leave your home country and go immerse yourself into a completely new culture.  A lot of people can't understand why I would ever leave in the first place (recently a co-worker rather aggressively told me I was a horrible person for going off and leaving my family like that for 8 years.)

Now that I'm here feeling so unsettled with life in general, I just have to look back and remind myself that I have had the opportunity to do some amazing things and see some pretty amazing places.  These are a few (a lot of) my favorites...

Kyoto, Osaka, Dubai and Abu Dhabi were my playgrounds.  I learned how to navigate some of the biggest cities in the world (in another language), visited world heritage sites as if they were in my backyard and went to the top of the tallest building in the world...

I've had breakfast in the Burj Al Arab, tako yaki on the streets of Japan, sushi straight out of the Sea of Japan in my Japanese "family's" home, learned traditional tea ceremony and baked Christmas cookies with my students...

 I was lucky enough to teach students who were genuinely excited to see me every day...

And these guys whose continuous letters and text messages from their parents remind me that I am good at what I do...

I've ridden on a Japanese Destroyer, watched professional tennis in Abu Dhabi, taken a boat ride around the Palm in Dubai, and walked through the desert...

 The best part is the friends I've made along the way...

And that's only a fraction of them - not even including my other travels.  Looking back on all of those experiences makes me realize that those comments that made me feel like shit (sorry for the language, but let's face it, there's no other way to put it) don't seem to matter so much anymore.

I won't let being back in the US be the end of my adventures, and I won't let people who know nothing about me try and dictate my life.

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