On Post-Volunteer Depression and the Meaning of Life.

I’d like to share a very personal story about difficulties of my adaptation to life after a year of international volunteering. I wrote this text in one day, but it took much longer to share. Sometimes it’s just as hard to admit your troubles as to live through them.

Becoming a long-term volunteer is not unlike being a buddist monk. You’re giving up a settled life, comforts and personal ambitions for the benefit of society. Instead of a salary you work for food and instead of a home get a place to sleep, rely on kindness of strangers and learn to curb your ego, step back and do what required for the common good.

Whether you don’t realise it and think it’s just having fun saving frogs or playing with kids and traveling, is irrelevant. A big shift in lifestyle brings a big shift in mind. So how to face going back?

Getting Sick

Stage 1. Precursors of Disease

“Something shifted, something changed, something is wrong with me, I can’t fit in my own homeworld.”

My last day of 11-months’ volunteering adventure (European Voluntary Service in UK) started at 9 in the morning with a colleague banging into our house door. We needed to clear the house by 3, and in a true spirit of volunteering collect all the nice stuff accumulated by 7 people and get rid of this load of undesired junk. The smartest ones took early flights and were off to their new lives of college students, fresh employees, teachers, etc.

I was the one who stayed “to clean”. Then I stayed a bit longer to travel around UK, then yet longer to lead a volunteer project, and so on until a month later seeing me entering NGO’s office again a lady at the entrance desk wondered whether I was going to leave at all. With all earnesty I was, I just wasn’t in a hurry. And what’s wrong with that?

Stage 2. “What’s Next, Pal?”

Truth be told, nothing was waiting for me back home. The question “what are your plans now” drifted all the way from my friends’ apartment in Cardiff to Luton airport to the melting streets of late September Kyiv like some kind of a contagious perfume.

In my head when people asked the tiresom “what next” question (although I don’t ask them how much they earn, right? Almost never), their eyes filled with barely hidden contempt as if what they really wanted to say was something along the lines of “oh my god you’ve just waisted an entire year of your life (by the way you are dying every day and not getting younger at all) on a work that nobody understands and nobody pays to be done. We would get very surprised if you recover from such a fit of sheer madness. Good luck.” Of course it was nothing but my brain’s projections as the panick started to overcome my normally cheerful nature.

Stage 3. Add Some Cultural Shock

And don’t forget the whole intercultural story. One year away is enough to become a little bit of a stranger in your home country.

I soon came to realization that all Ukrainians considered “returning to Ukraine rather than staying in the West” as an epic fail. “Wasn’t there any chance to stick around? I thought you were smart”, — many people wondered with a friendly smile of a funeral curtsey. This inferiority complex of “Ukraine as the worst possible place to be” stemmed from Soviet Union, where people were not allowed to see the outside world, and for generations went on forming unrealistic image of the perfect “abroad wonderland” where you leave to be happy for ever and ever. When I was little my mom would say “oh, you haven’t cleaned your room, how can you be a European, all Europeans clean their rooms all the time. And their shoes too.” (writing this I start to realise that it could have been some sort of an educational trick though).

What people don’t realize is that every country has pros and cons. And though returning to Ukraine you don’t get to enjoy nice UK highways and pubs, you also don’t get to suffer everyday rains and plastic vegetables.

However it takes time to convince and a lot of energy too, so I ended up replying to “why not UK” that I was just a bid mad.

Stage 4. The Horror of Moving On.

The most painful part was a job. For me, a writer with a wonderfully unemployable degree in English and German Linguistics money have never been a factor. It was more about interesting things to work on, and when I thought about home still in UK I imagined coming back to organise an activist movement in my hometown of Kharkov.

But a week passed. And another one. I ran out of friends to meet and celebrate return. Still on the peak of energy from the past year, I was unable to re-establish any professional contacts with local organizations. They just didn’t answer Facebook messages. On top of that every single grant and internship I applied to was rejected. Daily rejections were flowing through me like flocks of autumn birds.

I returned to square one— finding at least one person interested in doing anything together. And they say overseas volunteering helps you grow? Grow what — hair?

Stage 5. Brain Gets Loud in Telling What It “Really” Thinks

With Napoleon plans to create a writer’s hub and do all of those field projects crashed over everyone’s moving on, I wound up back in the old room at my parents’ house I’d thought I left many years ago, no money, no boyfriend again, no co-thinkers and apparently no talent to organise life except for being a perpetual volunteer.

Think about job search? A year of office work proved that I was not fit for the majority of 9–5 applications. Like an old junky I flew to a 2-day volunteer project in Romania.

At this point life became an exchausting wheel of long days. With no interest in the beauties of Bucharest I slept for 20 hours in an empty hostel room by the main train station.

Stage 6. Body Fails

It was only when my body started to switch off for 15–20 hours at a time when I realised something was a bit wrong. Of course rather than visit an actual doctor, or a free one, I decided it was time to “clean the attick”.

Treatment.

Step 1. “Clean the Attick”.

When we move apartments the “big clean” seems obvious. So how is moving your brain from one phase to another different? It can take as much as a sheet of paper, a pen, and a plan say for the next 3 months. Or a visit to a therapist. Or even two weeks at your grandma’s village looking alcoholics selling fish and enjoying their lives.

With me it was a 10-day meditation retreat. No books, no internet, no speech. Wake up at 4 am and think about your life for 14 hours a day (very soon you start to understand that it’s better to think about breething though, an efficient calming down technique).

Step 2. Acknowledge the change, say thank you and move on.

When buddists convinced me that we shall all die anyway so why not be happy while it lasts I started to notice that not all people ridiculed my choices.

A lady who once had a very poisonous governmental job thanked me for a project with local youth we made. Another guy wrote that my blog on volunteering inspired him to travel eco-friendly.

I felt gratitude for the year that helped me do these good deeds and… let go.

Step 3. Opportunities. No Hurry

If you managed to transfer straight from lotus plantations to IT office, great. You probably haven’t experienced any of transition phases. But if your mind has felt the agony of uncertainty, slow it down (Just don’t sleep). Walk in the water step by step.

Rather than jumping straight into the world of careers I took a light freelance assignment and started translating a book. It brought real joy if not money, and would’t possibly hurt a CV.

Step 5. Off To a Brighter Future

Having drafted a routine calendar for the next 3 months, expressed my gratitude and acknowledged important social impact of that volunteering year, I started to get enough energy for planning the future.

So now, although still without what my dad calls “real job” (i.e. working in the nuclear power plant or such), I got a very clear idea of what I will be good at and what I want to do. And all the failures prepared me not to be too much affected by challenges. Even failures don’t last forever.

Finally with work and persistence I started to enjoy the “real world” again. Hopefully these tips will help you to do the same.

Summing Up Advice For Depressed Volunteers — a good course of action on the way from volunteering to real life beings when you:

1. acknowledge that everything always changes and you never really get back to square one;
2. your experience really was important;
3. don’t cling to the past —because it is too exchausting and you might catch ‘oversleep’ or other unhealthy habits;
4. narrow down 5 things that bring smile to your face;
5. choose among them ones that have potential to be a life work;
6. work patiently and persistently;
7. make an agreement with yourself: give a month or a year to try something new, but son’t give up on a first, second, or fifteenth “no”;
8. understand that society will benefit the most if you discover your true talent and share it with the world;
9. don’t be shy to not fit into the stereotypes of your culture and enjoy the freedom.