Apologies

I am sorry that I have been absent from my blog. There have been several reasons that I haven't posted recently. Some are work related, some are personal, and the primary reason is that I just returned from a long needed holiday to visit family in the Far East. After I returned from Singapore last weekend I went into a little bit of a funk. It strikes me that every time I return to the United States I am feeling a little more reluctance to return to my life here.

Once upon a time my institution had meetings where librarians could meet and discuss what we perceived to be recruitment and retention problems. I remember bringing up home sickness as something that affected retention. This was after I had been here a whole six months so it wasn't a personal sense of missing my home but rather recognition that those of us who have chosen to relocate for work don't have the same connections that many of our other coworkers take for granted.

Ironically, before I was dealt a professional disappointment I was actually thinking about creating a more permanent home here in Houston for myself. Now, I feel disconnected from my workplace after returning from an extended holiday and in truth I am feeling quite lonely. I have some choices to make in the immediate future and I am not sure if I am in the correct state of mind to be making them. Since I moved to Houston over 5 years ago, I have lost touch with some people while holding other friends close to me even with the distances involved. My family is spread all over the world and I know that many of my coworkers and friends in Houston have become my de facto family.

So how to resolve this enuie? As a librarian my first impulse is to research the problem, and I located some interesting articles on expatriate adjustments. Attachment theory when applied to immigrant groups in Immigration from an Attachment Perspective by Yolanda van Ecke suggests that, "we like to explore, as long as we have a secure base to which to return." I was once criticized for taking too much holiday time by a supervisor. I don't know if this person could understand or recognize that without my twice a year visits home I don't know if I could have stayed this long.

This isn't something that will be resolved quickly or easily but perhaps this is the road that I need to explore at this point in time.