Reverse Culture Shock Quotes

“When you travel overseas, the locals see you as a foreigner, and when you return, you see the locals as foreigners.”
― Robert Black

“It is dangerous to abandon one's own country,
but it is more dangerous still to return to it, for then your fellow country-men, if they can, will drive a knife into your heart.”
― James Joyce

“After Peace Corps, I kept at it. I was back in Houston, I had a lot of spare time, and I spent it at midday yoga classes at expensive studios to which I would buy discounted first-time packages and never return. This period, around 2011, reintroduced me to the world of American abundance. The first time I went into a grocery store and saw how many different fruits there were, I cried. At these yoga classes, I marveled at the fanatic high functionality of the women around me...I was not, at the time, on their level: I had been taking giardia shits in a backyard outhouse for a year straight, and I was flooded with dread and spiritual uselessness, the sense that I had failed myself and others, the fear that I would never again be use to another human being.”
― Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion