Leaving the Arctic is tough, but returning to ‘civilization’ is much harder

First Person is a daily personal piece submitted by readers. Have a story to tell? See our guidelines at tgam.ca/essayguide.

Open this photo in gallery:

People always ask about the beginning of an expedition – how you prepare, what you pack, whether you’re scared.

Almost no one asks about the ending.

When you live for long stretches in the polar regions, you learn that leaving is only the first goodbye. The harder one comes later, quietly, when you return.

I’ve felt it in the Arctic and the Antarctic, but the memory that stays with me is a particular kind of silence – a silence with shape. In a small cabin north of the tree line, the world simplifies. Weather becomes your schedule. Light becomes your calendar. Your body learns to listen: to wind direction, to snow texture, to the way sea ice speaks before it shifts.

Days have edges again. You make tea. You read the same page twice because your mind is not being yanked in five directions. When the sun returns after months away, it doesn’t announce itself with fireworks. It arrives like a patient friend.

And then, suddenly, you’re back in civilization.

First Person: After my divorce, I sold everything to travel. I love being a middle-aged nomad

The airport is the first shock: the fluorescent light that never changes, the loudspeaker that never rests, the conveyor belts and the plastic bins and the tiny urgent signs telling you where to stand. I’ve watched seasoned expedition leaders – people who can handle katabatic winds and Zodiac landings – become oddly overwhelmed by a busy terminal.

The world expects you to be grateful, energized, ready to slide back into your life like a coat you hung up neatly months ago.

But inside, something lags behind.

I once walked into a grocery store within 48 hours of coming home and stood frozen in front of the cereal aisle – an entire wall of choices, bright boxes shouting at me from every angle. I laughed at myself, because it was ridiculous. I’ve made decisions in whiteouts. I’ve navigated polar nights. And here I was undone by granola.

That’s when I started calling it “the longest goodbye.”

Because the real farewell isn’t to a place. It’s to a version of you that exists only out there: the you who doesn’t multitask, the you who lives at the speed of weather, the you who knows exactly what matters because the environment makes everything else impossible.

People understand this concept instinctively when we talk about astronauts. We’re fascinated by the moment they step back onto Earth. We watch their wobbly legs, their disoriented smiles. We talk about readapting to gravity.

First Person: I thought business travel as a widowed parent would be hard – but now I take my kids with me

But there’s another kind of gravity that doesn’t show up in photographs: the invisible pull of noise, hurry, performance and constant availability. The pull of being “fine.”

Coming home from a remote expedition, friends will ask, “How was it?” And you’ll start with the safe answers: the wildlife, the ice, the aurora, the spectacular photographs. But what you want to say is harder.

You want to say: I miss the way I slept. I miss the way my mind felt. I miss the simplicity of a day with one purpose. I miss the feeling of being held by the land, even when it was harsh.

And then you feel guilty for missing it.

Because you’re supposed to be grateful for your warm bed and your running water and your friends and your city. You are grateful. Deeply. That’s not the point.

The point is that re-entry is real. And it isn’t only for explorers.

I’ve met people who described the same disorientation after caring for a parent through illness, after losing someone they loved, after moving countries, after surviving burnout, after becoming a new parent. Their world changed. They changed. And then one day the outside world expected them to snap back to normal.

But “normal” doesn’t always fit the person you became.

In the Arctic, resilience is not the dramatic kind. It’s not a speech. It’s a practice. You learn to build steady routines because routine is how the nervous system recognizes safety. You learn that humour is not denial – it’s oxygen. You learn to lean on others because pretending you don’t need anyone is how people get hurt.

First Person: Uprooting my family to live in Spain helped us grow in unexpected ways

So I started treating re-entry the same way I treat an expedition: with intention.

I began creating small rituals for the return. A day with no commitments except rest. A long walk near water. The decision to answer messages slowly, instead of proving I’m “back.” A willingness to say: I’m here, but I’m still arriving.

I also began naming what I was experiencing, because naming turns shame into information. If you can say “I’m in the longest goodbye,” you can stop thinking something is wrong with you.

Maybe that’s the most useful thing I’ve learned in wild places: the reminder that humans are not machines. We are animals with nervous systems. We need transitions. We need a runway, not a cliff.

The Arctic taught me how to begin again. Not by forcing a fresh start, but by returning to the essentials: light, rhythm, community, purpose.

So if you’ve come through a season that changed you – if you’ve left something behind, even if the world thinks you should be over it – consider this permission.

You may still be saying goodbye. You may still be arriving.

And that doesn’t mean you’re lost. It means you’re human.

Sunniva Sorby lives on Vancouver Island.