The past month, I have had very little to say.

This online space for my thoughts and experiences began because they were so unique and divergent from the life my friends and family knew - a way of documenting and processing who we became in Cambodia.

So now that we have settled back in our home country and into jobs, friendships, and commitments that seem common, I feel I have little to say. What can I talk about that would be interesting enough for you to spend time reading it? If I no longer talk about culture shock and Cambodian language and traveling around Southeast Asia, do my words still have significance? 

I feel a pull to succumb to the ordinary - to think that our lives have blended back into the fabric of America, indistinguishable from so many other young professional families. Yet memories stand out, reminding me that the formative years of our marriage were spent in a place as foreign to Kansas City as the moon.

Yet I still want to write. My thoughts pile up and scatter, then reform themselves into strings of sentences and paragraphs, aching to be typed out. It is my way of pushing back, of refusing to let go of all the changes Cambodia wrought in my heart. 

Because that's what I'm struggling against: slipping back into a lifestyle shaped by comfortable pursuits and easy relationships. It is so easy here in my middle class, mostly-white neighborhood to ignore the poverty and brokenness that exists behind closed doors and hard hearts. Without an expiration date on our time here, it's easy to feel no rush to live an extraordinary life. Cambodia was always bookended by home leaves and holidays. We always knew we would leave eventually, even if just for a month. But here? Life has a very different timeline.

You can see that our transition back home is still very much in process. And I'm struggling to find my voice in our new life. Yet I hope to write still, if only to keep the roots of our past intact and find ways to build on what we have already done.

Have you ever struggled to keep writing in the face of huge transitions? How did you do it?