A Ghost in Your Own Home
Semester Abroad: Exchange at Penn
Elle, one of the Exchange at Penn Correspondents, shares her experience here at Penn during the Spring 2026 semester. Follow along with the group of correspondents on our blog and look out for their images on the @exchangeatpenn Instagram feed.
Feeling like a ghost in your own home. A concept we all dread. Or maybe don’t even realise until it settles within us. A concept we don’t expect. An experience more universal than known.
This was something I was seeing a lot on Instagram reels back when I was applying for my study abroad, funnily enough it was the challenge I touched on in my application to the University of Pennsylvania, so it’s surreal how full circle this has all come when I look at in retrospect.
Back then, I came across video after video reflecting on the unexpected emotional aftermath of studying abroad, the strange feeling of becoming a ghost in your own country. It’s that unsettling limbo where your old routines no longer feel familiar, yet your life abroad has already faded into memory. You find yourself caught between two versions of yourself, yet no longer fully belonging to either.
I told myself that I’d navigate these feelings of liminality, through grounding myself in gratitude. The gratitude I have for the opportunity to have lived two very different lives, and for the growth that comes from bridging the space between them. And while this is still very much true, I think it’s a little different now in reality than it was in just my mind.
Now, being truly towards the end of my study abroad experience at Penn, I feel like I can reflect on these feelings better than when they were just an imagined reality.
For me, studying abroad has been a way of stretching my identity. I notice difference everywhere I go and everywhere I am. Like how people speak, how systems function, the way you either blend in, stand out or are somewhere in between those two places. I guess liminality is truly what’s at heart here. Subtle shifts become a normality, and sooner or later, you realise that it’s not the place that’s changed but just you.
The version of yourself that left is not quite the same version that returns. Your reference points expand. Your habits shift. Even the way you interpret language, conversations, humour, or social cues evolves slightly. None of it is dramatic enough to notice day by day, but collectively it creates something tangible.
I think that’s where the “ghost” feeling sinks in, that sense of feeling like you’re in a motion picture where everything else is solid and moving in time. Instead, you’re transient, still moving, just to a slightly different rhythm or set against a slightly different temporality.
You still belong. But you’re realising you suddenly exist between two versions of familiarity. Most importantly, between two versions of yourself. Past and present.
You belong at home, yet part of you has adapted to somewhere else. And when those two worlds meet again, it can feel slightly disorienting, like walking through a place that is both completely yours and somehow not entirely.
It’s simply strange. And yet beautiful.
Learning to exist between multiple homes, cultures and fazes of life is an interesting one for sure. Studying abroad has gifted me the lesson of learning I can belong everywhere and also not belong anywhere at all.
Nothing is ever fixed.
Not us, not home. And maybe the sooner we accept that, the less like ghosts we feel.