Arriving Well: Stories about identity, belonging, and rediscovering home after living abroad

by Cate Brubaker

The term “re-entry” is used to describe the process of returning and adjusting to life in your passport country. It originally came from the idea of a spacecraft re-entering the earth’s orbit. We love that picture—it sums up the concept perfectly. You left your own planet and experienced new things; you’ve become someone different in ways that you couldn’t have imagined; and now you’re returning, and there will be some burn-up during the re-entry—it’s what happens when you enter the atmosphere of a planet. Things that you had with you get lost along the way. Things you carried with you from the past into your new life get honed and changed. You are basically the same person who went away and yet fundamentally, totally different. And so is your “home.”