I can only speak of my own experience. My longer journeys has always been for doing voluntary work. Often that meant I got to experience these moments of fantas

I can only speak of my own experience. My longer journeys has always been for doing voluntary work. Often that meant I got to experience these moments of fantastic joy and then the next day moments of extreme misery (not to my person but local people around me). So part of it is an emotional roller coaster. The other part is intellectual, I got to learn how other cultures and languages work, far removed from my own. I learned new ways of dealing with things in life. It sounds small now that I write it but it's truly mind expanding. When I got back I felt that I had thoroughly changed, yet my friends and family considered me to be the same person I was when I left. How could they do anything else? They couldn't possibly know what I had been through. To them I had just been away for a (short) while. To me they started to feel narrow-minded and set in their ways. The things I now found interesting weren't interesting to them, they couldn't understand them. The things they found interesting had lost its appeal to me.