Robert Kirby’s humor column today is about post-mission readjustment. I’ve been trying to come up with a blog post on just this subject for a while, but his article is funnier than anything thing I probably could have done, so I’ll just link to it.
In college, a couple of my roommates and I found it entertaining to sit very close to a very recently returned missionary and flirt a bit, just to watch him sweat. Cruel? Absolutely. But also a lot of fun. Mostly, though, I just watched with a distant curiosity as the recently returned elders readjusted.
I specify elders because the sisters didn’t seem to have as much of a problem readjusting. I imagine this is due to gender differences, as well as sisters usually being at couple years older. Or maybe I’m just not observant enough. Please let me know what you’ve observed.
However, I am aware of my own post-mission readjustment issues. I had no problems with guys or watching that evil TV (Mom had kindly recorded all the X-Files episodes I’d missed while gone, so I promptly and giddily began the X-Files marathon). No, my issues involved wanting to avoid as much human contact as possible. After 18+ months of having to be outgoing and social and constantly being surrounded by people, I just wanted to be ALONE. That first semester back at school, my plan involved going to class and church and nothing else. I’d just lock myself away – ALONE – and study. The plan didn’t work out as well as hoped due to an unfortunate calling as FHE group leader and some mandatory study groups for a couple classes (okay, they actually turned out to be fun), but overall, I achieved my goal of isolation. My poor roommates… they must have found me a bit odd. They were so nice, and always invited me to join them when they went out or did anything. I believe I joined them twice over the course of the semester.
But summer arrived, and I got a grip and balanced out to the well-rounded individual you read before you today. Actually, the anti-people phase aside, the mission did have the beneficial effect of helping me get over a lot of my shyness, so I’m happy about that.
So now it’s confession time, dear bloggernaclers. What was your immediate post-mission life like? If it’s too shameful, feel free to talk about your siblings or friends.
Wow, we must be related 😉 The weekend I got home, someone I knew was throwing a party, and I was dragged into going. When I came home, I said that the greatest thing in the world was not having to talk to ANYONE! I was so happy to be able to ignore (in the sense of “not engage in conversation,” not “snub”) passersby, people on the bus, random ward members, etc. and just be me again. Not sure I ever got over the phase. Rather, I’ve been ensconced in it. I can go for a day or two without actually talking to anyone but my wife and people who call on the phone.
I’ve been referring people to that introvert article you posted a while back.
Mom had kindly recorded all the X-Files episodes I’d missed while gone
That’s hilarious. I did exactly the same thing, except I had TWO years to catch up on!
I think ever RM needs that boot camp. Luckily for me I had a return “Boot camp” experience. My best bud got home from his mission a few weeks before me. He came to my misssion with my family and we toured around for a while. I think that helped quite a bit. I was in my familiar surroundings(which i was comfortable with), but with people from home (who I was not comfortable with). Then when I flew home, we had a party at my house with GASP, FEMALES, who we hung out with til early morning(nothing like jumping in with both feet). I then had 2-3 weeks with nothing to do until school started. With not enough time to get a job, I had time to do all the things I wanted to do. Hang out with Moms and help her cook. Play with my little sister, Catch up on the Movies I missed, Watch the new 500+ channel cable, stay out til all hours. Go to a regional YSL softball tourney. Get a car. Basically the Mormon Bachannal! And I could be weird, spastic, whatever because I had no one to impress, no life to get on with whatever. After I had the shock treatment over, I could then get on with life at the Y. Which depite its weirdness, felt kinda like mission life which was sort of comforting after a wild few weeks.
Ben, three cheers for Spackman genes! Glad that article is getting around. The extroverts need to be educated 😉
Ronan, I hope your X-Files post-mission marathon was as enjoyable as mine.
Jay, I love your description of a “Mormon Bachannal”. We are indeed a peculiar people.
I don’t remember having problems adjusting to regualr life again. My parents said I was weird for a couple of weeks, but can’t give me specifics, and a couple of my friends remember me rebuking them after they took me to a PG-13 movie that I thought was PG. The only thing I haven’t kicked is the sleep schedule. 9 years later my body still won’t let me sleep past 6 a.m., even if I was awake until 2 a.m.
Everybody said I didn’t talk for about two months. It wasn’t shyness–it was an inability to speak straight English. I was accustomed to speaking a mixture of English and Japanese, and had to slow down and think through everything I was saying to make sure it was all English. It was easier just to say nothing at all.
Some friends invited me over to their house for a movie marathon and we wound up watching Adam Sandler’s “Billy Madison.”
It was an awful movie. It’s still awful – but having been home less the 48 hours – well – most of us could imagine what my reaction might have been like. I felt very, very dirty.
Then we watched Star Trek: First Contact and all was right with the world again.
Ahh, the memories.
A few weeks after getting home from my mission, I went on a date with a really cute brunette who I had had a kinda-crush on, on and off, for some time. We had a great time talking, going to some activity (I don’t recall what, probably dinner and activity of some sort). Then I drove her home.
I stopped the car. I glanced over at my date. And she gave me an . . . expectant . . . look, and a smile.
And I was out of that car so fast it was not funny.
I got her door, walked her to her doorstep. I don’t recall if I gave her a handshake goodnight or not. It was our last date.
Of course, I kicked myself the whole way home. But two years of habit and training had kicked in (at just the wrong time). There are enough girls wanting to flirt with the missionaries in Guatemala, that you have to be ready to avoid the situation. Such habit does interfere with future dating, until it is overcome.
It was far more difficult coming home from Guatemala than it was leaving home for there. I remember just sitting on my couch for hours at a time watching several episodes of SportsCenter one after another, which lasted an entire week. My brother joked that my butt-imprint would have to be removed from the couch after a few more days. It was tough getting used to real-life. I did go on a couple of awkward dates, though nothing memorable happened. Most of all, I remember just wanting to be left alone.
I got home in February and didn’t go back to school until the fall, so I had a lot of time at home. I ended up doing work at my dad’s law office, so I put on a suit and tie every morning, just like I had been doing for the past two years. Plus, all of my friends were away at school, so I could be as alone as I liked. Pretty easy adjustment.
Easiest adjustment in my life. I loved Guatemala and served faithfully but I was excited to be home. Two days after I got home I went to a Blink 182 concert (before they got huge) and kissed a girl within a couple weeks. No awkwardness whatsoever.
I had the opposite reaction. After my mission, I felt that the meaning of existence was found in overlong discussions of life and living. I was ansy when not engaged in overwrought conversations, not necessarily about spirituality, but at least in the sense that I was somehow “meaningfully” connecting to other humans. I would get frustrated if my friends wanted to sit quietly and watch a movie, I mean, it meant we weren’t solving the world’s problems or expanding our souls. This drive led me to spend many nights talking about nothing to early hours of the morning. I am sure I was insufferable. Now I am perfectly happy to be quiet and post on internet bulletin boards.
The change in diet and hygienic products also was surprisingly an adjustment. I always stank, perhaps an offshoot of losing the mantle which works like a musk on investigators’ olfactory senses.
Strangely, the moment I think that changed this unhealthy state of animation (not the stench though, that just took time) was a disillusionment with some of my ideas of gains on my mission. An married investigator who called to imply there was a romantic interest on her part, no doubt a result of conflating spirit with romance (I stank, folks), problematized some of my conversational zeal. But even then, I look back on the rm weirdness with a good deal of fondness.
PS>Also, there was some problem with me accusing well-meaning middle-class americans of flaunting their bourgeios opulence. Houses and apartments appeared egregiously enormous to my second-world accustomed eyes.
I love Kirby. I especially loved his book called something Last Night I Dreamed I Went to Hell and It was in Delta, Utah. Because my ex-husband was from Delta.
My husband had a hard time talking to American girls when he first got back. A group of his good friends, including a girl he’d briefly dated before his mission – let’s call her Sarah, threw him a birthday party a few weeks after he got home, and he couldn’t think of anything to say to the girls. When Sarah came over to talk to him, he looked at her at her for a sec but could not maintain eye contact. He finally focused on her feet. He blurted out, “You have really long toes.” And then he couldn’t think of anything else to say to her, so he just bolted from the room. Heh.
I really don’t remember any oddities with my readjustment other than sleeping for two days straight after getting home and thinking that the mountains were extremely brown, the streets unbelievably wide, and looking in vain for a trash can in the stall in the restroom of LAX to put soiled toilet paper in. That threw me for a loop.
I remember that after my sister-in-law got home my wife and I went to a movie with her. It was Mystery Men. She freaked and wanted to leave, claiming it was the filthiest thing she’s ever seen. We still tease her about that.
I still have the following dreams from time to time although the other missionaries can change or the exact details. They tend to be rather long dreams and it is like I experience a few days in the dreams.
The first type of dream involves being at the MTC. I know that I have already served a mission in this dream and this is prior to a second mission. My companion seems to be no where to be found for much of my dream. This is very disconcerting to me. It seems like I have not even seen my companion except in passing for my whole MTC experience.
The next dream involves the Missionary Guide. I was rather fanatical about studying that as a missionary. I even said that I would study that with my future spouse lol. In my dream, I have been on my mission for quite a while. I even go on teaching assignments and everything seems to be going well. I am getting along well with my companion. I know in at least one of my dreams, my companion is my sister. This probably stems from my wish that my sister would join the Church while I was on my mission and then go on a mission a year later so we could be companions. She has never joined the Church and is married now but I still dream it. However, regardless of who my companion is, we just never seem to get around to studying the Missionary Guide. I tell myself to make a concerted effort and yet it seems like days roll by and we never get around to reading it. I am not horrified or anything. I am upset at this shortcoming and a little mystified as to how I we never seem to get around to studying the Missionary Guide.
As far as the immediate return home, I think I adjusted pretty well. I did find certain things a little shocking on t.v. I had to laught at the part about calling friends to repentance at the thought of drinking Diet Coke. I remember being shocked when I was out with some RM’s when I went on a ward temple trip to Colorado and that all of my friends ordered drinks with caffeine. Even before my mission, I usually avoided the stuff once I joined the Church. I could not reconcile this.
I liked having time to think and reflect but I was pretty social and liked that too. I read a book before my missin though and vowed that I would never kiss another guy after reading that book and other than a guy kissing my on the cheek, I have held true to this. The book also made me feel guilty just holding hands with a guy too but eventually, I got over that. 🙂 I am sure there were other reasons for my hangups but I will spare the reader. I had other problems that were evident and really intensify six months later but I do not want to kill the mood of this light post.
While I was away my mother taped the entire seasons 2 and 3 of Star Trek: The Next Generation for me. I’m such a geek.
I remember driving a car by myself for the first time after returning. It was surreal experience.
The biggest change was having to get used to nobody staring at me anymore. Everywhere I went on my mission, people stared — not gawking, but furtive glances. It was strange not being noticed anymore.
Barb, I’ve had almost identical MTC dreams. Ah, stress dreams.
I asked my dad if I missed any good movies when I was gone. He said, “No, not really. Oh wait, there was one.” We then watched it: “Tommy Boy.”
I don’t remember any readjustment difficulties. Perhaps that means I wasn’t as invested in the missionary life as I should have been, though I think I was a diligent and obedient missionary.
I do remember noting what seemed to be the extraordinary opulence of my parents’ home (which I think is pretty ordinary by the standards of suburban Dallas). Though I shortly returned to Provo, which was much more comfortable for its similarity to the 3rd world.
Serving in Nevada meant I didn’t have the sort of greatly-jarring readjustment to a first-world lifestyle that others here mention. (I even heard about the OJ Simpson slow-speed car chase the night it happened while in the mission office, from a fellow missionary who’d heard about it while talking to a member on the phone.)
The two cultural memes I noticed upon my release as having emerged while I was gone: The Wonderbra and Barney the dinosaur.
The next year, went with a good friend the week after his release to a Jerry Bruckheimer summer blockbuster. Good times.
When my mission service ended, I felt exhausted in many ways and there were only a couple of months until I would leave home to resume school, so I looked for an easy job. I took the graveyard shift minding a new convenience store on the edge of town. This was great for having time to myself, sometimes an hour or more between customers. Sweeping outside in the summer night was pleasant. From midnight until two or three, there would be a few casino workers coming off their shifts who would stop by for beer and cigarettes. Starting before five would be construction workers heading to the job who would pick up sandwiches and soda for the day. During my weeks there, I only had to ring up two or three pornographic magazines.
It got old before long, and I would sometimes think “A month ago I was preaching the gospel of salvation, and now I’m selling beer and cigarettes.” It was a good thing there were sandwiches to make for the construction workers; that was one small contribution to the good of mankind. Toward the end of the stint, a high school classmate stopped in. We chatted a while. Things were going good for him. He had a landscaping job and was making $500 a week. After he left, I was depressed and had to remind myself that my overall choices were good ones. The two years of missionary service had been purposeful. Going to college would lead to good things. At that moment, though, I was earning $3.50 an hour, fifteen cents above minimum wage, and I didn’t deserve a bit more for what I was doing. The next summer I found more appropriate labor.
Mike Parker reminds me of my first time driving a manual transmission after my mission. I had learned to drive an automatic, and never was very good with a stick shift before my mission. On my mission, I didn’t drive at all. When I got home, the only car available to me was our manual VW Rabbit. Somehow I managed to roll the car into the garage door before I figured out which pedal was the clutch and which was the brake.
As for cultural milestones, I asked a friend what I had missed. He thought for a couple of seconds and said, “Not much. Grunge and infomercials.”
I actually had no idea who the president of the United States was when I got home.
And I’ve been at Duke long enough to have developed implanted memories of Grant Hill-to-Christian Laettner to beat Kentucky, but I missed that too.
Hey John (Mansfield) could you drop me an email at clark@lextek.com?