So far, my most extended expedition with no contact at all was 90 days, and the longest I have been away was with limited contact was about five months. Big deal Will you travel for a long time. Yes, I do, and I usually love it. However, it can be hard.

Don’t get me wrong, I love expeditions, and shutting off my phone for a few months. This kind of change trip can be the catalyst for amazing discoveries. I believe it makes me more creative and deeper thinking. It forces me to get to know myself and accept who I am. On expeditions, I can also shed almost anything that is stressing me out. Most importantly, I have made some of my closest friends in the backcountry.

Every lifestyle has a downside. The biggest downside for me hits as with a weird after effect I think of like a time warp. When I leave on an expedition, time seems to pause for me, or at least time at home.

Everyone has their own lives and tons of things going on, but it feels like all of the things l leave should stop. I feel like my relationships should be in the same place, people should have the same haircuts, trees should be the same, and everything should be exactly how I left it.

No surprise, nothing ever is.

I have come home to all kinds of changes in circumstance, but each homecoming has one thing in common; a physical discomfort as everything recalibrates. Maybe reverse culture shock is the best way to describe it, but it is more than that. It feels in some ways like I just warped into the future, and upon arriving in the future, all of the things I miss are pressed through my body and mind rapidly. Catching up and recovering from the time warp takes me a couple of days.

To make things worse, explaining the expedition is impossible without experiencing it, but everyone wants to hear about it in condensed into a few sentences. I want to share my experiences and the lessons I have learned, but I want to do it in a way that ignite the same feelings I experienced in the moment.

As I write, I am considering deleting this entry forever. Partially because I don’t often talk about my feelings, but mostly because it feels like a complaint that I have no solution for, other than just dealing with it.

Of course, things will always go on, and of course people want to hear about amazing experiences. But I feel a weird sense of insignificance and alienation when time forces its way through me and only I know what happened in my time line. I doubt I am the only one who feels these time warps, but I don’t always know if people decipher the change I am going through.

Here I am at the end of the article, on my way home soon from two months on a ship in Antarctica. I didn’t delete the file yet, and I even posted it to the internet. Communicating with people about challenges we are working through helps us all grow and overcome the challenges, so even if I am not always the best at communication, I am trying a bit harder these days.

In this case, the main point is, when I get home I am going to need some time to process. Or if someone close to you just got back from whatever it might be, he or she might be struggling to catch up with reality and how the experiences fit into his or her new timeline.

Be patient.