New Moon Coaching for Expat Women

The promise of returning home after a long journey feels like one of humanity’s oldest instincts, yet it often brings an unexpected sense of reverse culture shock. Watching Christopher Nolan tackle The Odyssey brings that ancient tension back into sharp focus: what does it mean to spend decades away, fighting battles or building a life somewhere else, only to pack up and trace your steps back to where you started?

It naturally makes anyone who has spent years away from their roots pause and ask: Can you ever truly go back? And when you try, who is actually returning?

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Did Odysseus Really Change?

In archaic Greek epic, characters rarely undergo the radical psychological growth arcs we expect in modern literature. Odysseus enters the story already defined as polytropos—the man of many turns, clever and endlessly adaptable. Yet Homer does trace a subtle evolution in him: a shift from reckless pride to strategic self-restraint.

• The Young Hero: Early in his journey, after escaping the Cyclops Polyphemus, Odysseus cannot resist shouting his real name back to the shore to claim glory. That hubris directly brings down Poseidon’s curse, dooming him to another decade at sea.
• The Returning King: By the time he finally lands in Ithaca, he has learned patience. Disguised as a beggar by Athena, he endures insults, mockery, and physical abuse from Penelope’s suitors inside his own palace without lashing out prematurely.

Yet at his core, Odysseus remains anchored to his origins. Even while spending seven years on the island of Calypso, offered immortality and eternal youth, he sits on the shore every day weeping for a rocky, ordinary island called Ithaca. His essential identity is so bound to home that divine paradise cannot replace it.

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The Myth of the Unchanged Exile

This is where the ancient myth departs from modern reality. Odysseus’s journey suggests that if your core remains intact, home will welcome you back as if no time has passed. But for those of us who have lived abroad for years, the reality is very different.

When you leave your original home, two parallel timelines begin to run:

1. Home changes without you. The physical landscape shifts, favorite spots close, family members grow older, and social circles evolve their own inside jokes, histories, and rhythms that don’t include you.
2. You change away from home. Living in a different culture forces you to reconstruct yourself. You acquire new reference points, different values, and a perspective that makes you an outsider to your past self.

When you return you are confronting two different ghosts: the home you remembered, and the person you used to be when you lived there.

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Reverse Culture Shock: Can You Return to Ixtlan?

In Journey to Ixtlan, Carlos Castaneda uses “Ixtlan” as a metaphor for the place of your origins—a place you can never physically or spiritually re-enter once you have stepped onto the path of a traveler or warrior.

The short answer is no: you cannot recreate the exact experience of home that you hold in your memory.

Attempting to recreate the past leads to a specific kind of displacement known as reverse culture shock. You expect the comfort of familiarity, but instead, you feel like a stranger wearing a costume of your younger self. You discover that “home” was never just a physical location—it was a specific moment in time combined with a specific version of you. Because that past version of you no longer exists, the original experience of home cannot be recreated.

A Different Kind of Homecoming

Does that mean going back is impossible? Not necessarily. It just means the goal of returning has to change.

Going home after years away isn’t about picking up where you left off, as if your time abroad was just a long pause. It is about negotiating a new relationship with your origins.

Odysseus had to wear a disguise when he first stepped back onto Ithaca—not just to deceive the suitors, but symbolically because he could not simply walk back in as the man who left 20 years prior. Re-entering your past life requires a similar grace: acknowledging that you are bringing a stranger back to your old doorstep, and giving both yourself and your old home permission to be different than remembered.

When you go back to the places that shaped you, do you feel more like you’re stepping back into your past, or visiting it as a different person? Share your thoughts in the comments.