Returning home after living abroad - the initial days

I spent the last 10 months living in Seville, Spain. My mornings consisted of teaching English in a public school, having a tostada and coffee for breakfast, then returning home to relax and do anything I wanted. My weekends were spent traveling around Europe. From England to Albania, the continent was my playground. Before I left, I sold most of my belongings including my car, packed up an apartment I had lived in for 2.5 years in the heart of my city, ended a 3-year relationship, and quit my six-figure software job that had afforded me this life I had built. And I left and it was beautiful and hard and full and pretty much everything I had dreamed and everything that I hadn’t as well. I feel like I woke up and felt myself become alive for the first time in years.

But now I’m back.

I’m back in that city I grew up in. Back around my friends and loved ones that I hadn’t seen in almost a year. Back around all the shit I wanted to get away from and everything that helped build who I am.

How do you come back to your old life?

I’ve returned but I feel different. I feel familiar urges to do things a certain way and want certain things. There’s comfort in the familiar, something I haven’t had in 10 months. But now I find myself asking, “Why?” Why is this urge pulling me towards an old habit and is it something I want to bring with me to my new self? Or is this something that made me want to leave in the first place? These things are sneaky and maybe I’m wasting my time over-analyzing these impulses when I should probably focus my attention fully on job-hunting and apartment-hunting but I can’t help but sit with these emotions tied to everything I do while I’m back.

I have an opportunity that I’ve wanted for so long – to start over again. I have complete freedom to choose where I go from here and what I want to do. But then again, haven’t I always?