It has been almost 20 (!) years since I graduated from college, and since then, I have moved homes 11 times to 6 different cities in 3 states and 2 countries. The average person moves 11.7 times in their lifetime. (My lifetime total is 17.) 

Some aspects of moving are exciting: a fresh start, a new city to explore, new friends to make. But moving is difficult. The logistics and expenses that come with moving are burdensome. Saying goodbye to people you love is really sad. Trying to make new friends becomes more challenging the older you get. Adjusting to a new place – its climate, traffic, grocery stores, housing options, local culture, local services, the food scene, and more – takes a lot of time and physical, mental, and emotional effort. Adding pets and small children into the mix complicates moving even more. 

Some moves I couldn’t wait to make; others I dreaded. One year, after a particularly difficult move, I began to wonder if I could use my prior experiences to help me shift my perspective. In my early twenties, I spent two years abroad studying and working, and it dawned on me that the lessons I learned about adapting to life in another country and culture could be applied to any move, anywhere. Those lessons came from going through what’s known as Culture Shock.

Three months after I graduated from college, I moved to Spain to spend a year getting a Master’s Degree in Spanish at Middlebury College’s campus in Madrid. Upon our arrival, all students were required to attend an orientation session. The program director covered all the basic introductory topics like academic expectations, health and safety, housing, etc. It also included a lecture on Culture Shock, now more commonly referred to as Cultural Adjustment, which is the  process of adapting to a new country and culture. By learning about the stages of Culture Shock, she explained, we would know what to expect  over the next several months as we adapted to our new environment. 

The four stages of Culture Shock are generally accepted to be Honeymoon, Hostility, Gradual Adjustment, and Acceptance, though they are sometimes called by different names. The Honeymoon phase, the director said, would last anywhere from 1-3 months. Everything would be new, interesting, and exciting. Then around months 2-3, Hostility would probably set in. We would likely feel frustrated or irritated with how different everything was and how hard it could be to do basic tasks. For some of us, these challenges would be compounded by discrimination. We might start to fixate on “how much better” everything was back home. Somewhere around months 6-9, Hostility would slowly give way to Adaptation and Acceptance. We would become more relaxed as we gained a sense of humor about cultural differences and our own mistakes. We would begin to feel “at home” in the new culture, having adapted to its norms and standards.

I did indeed move through each of the four stages that first year. When I first got to Madrid, it was fun to notice all the differences between there and home, and every new challenge felt like an adventure. It was exciting to try new things. I felt so much pride when I completed a simple errand or got somewhere without getting lost. But as time went on, those positive feelings gave way to exhaustion and annoyance. I grew tired of everything being so hard. It was draining to perform the mental and emotional gymnastics required to do daily life in another language. The streets began to feel too loud, the people seemed too harsh, and one day I decided I just didn’t like it there and never would. About month 4, I remember going to the program director and telling her I had had it, that I didn’t want to leave yet, but I also didn’t know how I was going to finish out the school year. I remember her telling me that everything I was feeling was valid and that if I could just hang in there a little longer, I would probably start to turn the corner. And if not, I could come back and we would talk again. 

I did some surface-level things that helped my adjustment over the next several months.  I moved to a new flat, made a few local friends, enrolled in a Spanish cooking class, and started going out more. But I also did some intense psychological work. I went through a sort of personal identity crisis – Who was I? What did I believe? Why? I thought critically about my own cultural assumptions, beliefs, and norms. I became more open to other ways of existing in the world and even adopted some of them. Then one day, I realized I was comfortable doing almost everything and interacting with almost anyone. It no longer drained me to buy shampoo, get on the metro, talk to a store clerk, or buy medicine at the pharmacy. I loved and appreciated things about Spain that I hadn’t before. While I more or less looked the same on the outside (minus a very Spanish-looking haircut), on the inside, I was fundamentally, irreversibly changed.

By the time the school term was over that first year, I had signed a contract to teach English in a school outside the city. I would stay to live and work in Madrid for a second year, which is when I think I completely adapted to living in Spain. I experienced being employed in another country and being even more on my own, without the structure and support of the American school program. I lived a pretty routine daily life, working at the school, doing English lessons in the evenings for extra money, going out with friends or traveling on the weekends when I could. I truly felt at home.

Toward the end of my second year, almost all the friends in my social circle decided they would be moving elsewhere, either out of the city or out of the country. Their programs were ending, they were taking new jobs, they were moving closer to family. I was in a romantic relationship, but it was coming to an end. My Spanish school offered to give me a permanent contract, which meant I could stay indefinitely to work in Spain. But I realized that I did not want to make a career out of teaching English abroad, and I didn’t have it in me to build a social circle from scratch again. So I, too, decided to move late that summer, back to the States.

When I returned home I was met with the harsh reality of Reverse Culture Shock. I hadn’t driven a car in almost 2 years. I also had to buy a new one. I had to get a new American phone. Smartphones had come onto the market in the U.S., changing the way people communicated and behaved, and it was jarring. I was so overwhelmed on my first trip to the AT&T store that I couldn’t even bring myself to pick out a phone and had to try again another day. Other once-routine things also seemed absurd. I vividly remember walking through an American grocery store and thinking that it was ridiculously enormous. 

I had changed, but everyone and everything at home had more or less stayed the same, and no one understood what I had just done. It was incredibly lonely. I was actually homesick for Spain. I had to go through the cultural adaptation process all over again, this time in reverse. It took almost another two years before things felt “normal” again.

The lessons I learned from Culture Shock have turned out to be invaluable for navigating other moves. I know I need to give myself at least 6-9 months to adjust, and about 2 years to feel settled. During that time, I could apply the same process that helped me turn Spain into home:

1. Observe. Notice. If I’m judging, I ask myself why and dig into that. 
2. I remind myself: The discomfort is where the growth happens. It’s in those tough moments that we build resilience, flexibility, openness, compassion, empathy, forgiveness, humor, gratitude, and acceptance—of both ourselves and others—if we’re willing to embrace it
3. Feel all the feelings. They are all valid. Seek support if needed.
4. Create joy. Find tiny moments that bring happiness. Try something new that seems manageable. Plan something to look forward to.
5. Find community. It might just be one good friend, but sometimes that’s all we need.

For me, it’s been most helpful to apply these steps to my frequent moves. For someone else, maybe it reminds them to give themselves grace while adjusting to something else, like a new job, an injury or illness, or becoming a parent. Either way, to an extent, this process can apply to pretty much any big transition in life. Any of these experiences can break us or transform us, depending on how we move through them. 

Living abroad forced me to closely examine how I had been seeing, understanding, and doing quite literally everything. It taught me how to handle loneliness and unfamiliarity, how to deal with the fear of the unknown, how to be resilient in the face of change, and how to have confidence in myself and my intuition. I still struggle with all these things, don’t get me wrong – but referring back to my these experiences gives me some hope I can get through it. Wherever I move and whatever I do, Spain is still with me, teaching me to hold on tight, observe without judgment, feel my feelings, stay in the discomfort, have courage (and a sense of humor!), create opportunities for joy, connect with a community, and make small changes day after day until things get better, because on the other side, I’ll always find home again.

The other day, I stood whooping for beads, arms waving, with a baby on my hip, as I watched one my town’s local Mardi Gras parades march past. I reached for a juice box for my youngest, and I looked up to see float riders passing by, dressed in plague doctor masks. These masks were first used as (ineffective) protection for physicians against the plagues of the 1500s and 1600s, and later morphed into an iconic carnival costume, meant to embody death and disease.

I turned to my husband, wrangling our other kids, pointed to the float and said, “Oh my God. THAT’S CARNIVAL.” 

I’m pretty sure he heard me and was like mmhmm, cool.

In the years I spent studying, reading, and writing about Early Modern Spanish literature while I completed a Ph.D., I learned about Mikhael Bakhtin (1895-1975), a literary theorist and philosopher. From the moment I saw the plague doctor masks, I couldn’t stop thinking of him and his theories. (Old habits die hard.)

Bakhtin was particularly interested in the carnivals of Medieval Europe, when traditional power structures of both church and state were inverted. Not only were revelers given a kind of sanctioned freedom for a period of time, but the established power hierarchies and the traditional order of things were open to ridicule and even re-examination. With the European Renaissance and the advent of capitalism, Bakhtin argues that the carnival spirit of society waned, but it was reborn as a literary tendency, most notably in Francois Rabelais Gargantua and Pantagruel. Like the carnivals themselves, carnivalesque literature fomented the deconstruction and re-imagination of established norms, making way for new ideas and alternate ways of seeing the world and existing in it.

Modern carnival is a time for extravagant celebrations, opulent costumes, gleeful parades, masquerade balls, and a glut of traditional food and drink that disrupt the monotonous predictability of our everyday lives. But historically, these few weeks a year of carnival are also a time for social and political parody; representations of overt sexuality, degrading acts, and vulgar language; grotesque depictions of the body and disease; and imagery of death as a joyful occasion. If you pay attention to even the quaintest of Mardi Gras parades, you are likely to catch allusions these more egregious iterations of the tradition – like I did. 

Carnival is, as Bakhtin would say, the world turned upside down. Everything that is normally prohibited is celebrated, and all that is virtuous is ridiculed. Even traditional hierarchies of power are temporarily, if only superficially, abandoned, and people of all classes momentarily live as equals in a rare instance of social unification. Masks that disguise the revelers’ identity not only afford them the anonymity to partake in the debauchery and disrespect of societal norms, but they also create a sea of humanity unbound by individual identities and power structures. During carnival, we are all the same fallen creatures, no one better than the next.

While the world is turned on its head for these few weeks, there is a collective release of social, political, religious, and sexual energy, which ironically serves to eventually reinforce the established order of things. After the chaos and indulgence of carnival, order, control, and structure are welcome respites. Society recalls why it does indeed prefer the norms by which it is traditionally controlled. And everything, more or less, goes back to normal.

When viewed in the context of the Covid years, I couldn’t help but see Mardi Gras in a new light. 

For one thing, Mardi Gras was cancelled in 2021, and we missed (and necessarily so) the opportunity for the brief escape and pressure release that carnival brings. 

For another, most of us have been living in what feels like a continually upside down world for more than two years, but without the gluttony, costumes, and merrymaking parts. Celebrations and gatherings of all kinds have been postponed over and over again. People have been dying who were too young and healthy to die; or who had survived any number of other illnesses and conditions only to finally succumb to Covid. Experts have been labeled as heretics and frauds. The information we have gotten from the top down has been sporadic, confusing, and often contradictory, leaving us floundering for how to make decisions. Healthcare professionals, first responders, teachers, and essential workers have been asked to do more than ever and risk their lives while doing it – for the same pay and half the respect. Conspiracy theories have been widely propagated and believed. Now, we watch in disbelief and horror as the world tiptoes around and away from Putin’s desire for World War III. And instead of the shared trauma creating societal unity, we are more unequal and clawing harder for our own power than ever before. 

Many people, long before Covid, lived and still live in a sort of perpetual upside down world, and as such the world we have now must not feel as foreign to them as it does to others who are fortunate enough to live more or less comfortably within the established order of things. 

I imagine, though, that for all of us, carnival hits a little differently this year. We get to pretend that even in the strangest and scariest of times, we can still flip our world inside out for these weeks of festivity before Lent, pretending that we still have some modicum of control over how things happen, even if we don’t. Maybe we remember for a few days that we are not that different from all the people we make out to be monstrous. We have the opportunity to connect with other humans over our fallenness. We find, I hope, some comfort in the recognizance of our shared vulnerability, our common primal needs and instincts, our sins (whatever we believe those to be), and yes, even our goodness. Maybe most of all, we are reminded that when everything is so upside down all the time, we can choose – as we do during carnival –  to face life with a tenacious determination to play, create, re-think, re-imagine, and find joy and connection, no matter our literal or metaphorical distance from one another.

Carnival is still for reveling, celebrating, releasing, losing yourself, forgetting the rules, indulging, feeling your feelings, and rediscovering your gut instincts. Maybe even for remembering why you love people. And when it’s over, the normal order returns, as it always does, even if little by little it gets modified or torn down in places – but it’s us who don’t have to come back the same.

When I feel as if the world might pull me under, I put my feet in the grass. And since I live on a barrier island on the Gulf Coast, I can do this pretty much year round. 

If I have shoes or socks on, I take them off. I find a green spot in the sun and I engage in full-on mountain pose right in that very spot. I wiggle my toes down so they can grip the earth, finding traction among the blades of grass. My efforts to ground myself never feel quite grippy enough – I wish the soles of my feet could sprout roots – but I do my best to dig my heels into the dirt below and find my place.

I don’t quite remember when I started this ritual as a way to keep from losing my ever-loving mind, but it has become one to which I cling tightly. I do recall as a child loving the feeling of cool grass on my bare feet, but the connection between the soles of my soul and the scalp of the earth began as an adult.

These past few years have been … hard. Even though I’m trying to stop doing this, I’ll qualify that “hard” with all the gratitude I have for everything and everyone in my life. I am in the throes of small children who need me and depend on me in a very physical and emotional way 24/7, my spouse is in medical training, and as a highly intellectual being living a decidedly un-intellectual life, my truest self seems to mostly float just out of reach.

So when I’m losing my shit, I go outside, to the ground, and the grass.

When I find my sunny patch and shimmy my toes as close as I can get to Mother Earth, I start to feel my soul awaken. I have literal solid ground on which to stand when everything around me whirls by, or else lands with a sharp thud on my mind or my heart.

In this position, sometimes my mind wanders to what chemicals my skin might be absorbing, or if I’m standing in ants, or if one of my children has left the yard entirely. But usually, for at least a few breaths, I am reminded that I am still here on the earth, my body is held by my feet, my shoulders are stacked on my hips, and my mind is balanced over my heart.

I’m whole. I’m here.

I belong on the earth, under the sun, in the dust from whence I rose, and to which at my death I shall return. And in the interim: a little earth, water, and sunlight empower me to love, breathe, grow, and live.