"Our
roots can go anywhere and we can survive, because if you think about it,
we take our roots with us. You can go back to where they are and they can be
less real to you than they were three thousand, six thousand miles away. The
essential thing is to have the feeling that they exist, that they are somewhere."
-Gertrude Stein
There’s something invigorating about moving abroad. Moving
someplace where no one knows you and where no one has any expectations of you
gives you a certain freedom to reinvent your conception of self. When your only
real responsibility abroad is to make enough cash to keep living abroad, you
find yourself abroad doing and thinking things quite out of character. You’re high on
the thrill of having moved to a strange country and wresting a life for
yourself from the chaos: a job, an apartment, some friends. On top of this
you’re surrounded by a foreign culture, speaking a language you have imperfect
command of, watching the people around you do things that, from your limited
outsider’s perspective, seem illogical or even insane. In this new context you
feel as if you can be and do whatever you want. The gravity has been sucked out
of your life and you’re floating in space, comforted by the complete lack of
consequences.
This may seem like a bourgeois conception of what it is to
live overseas and it probably is. Yet it is something experienced by those
with the privilege to immigrate for pleasure rather than necessity. It can be like returning to summer camp or university. And like both it can attract both those
with the desire to grow from living in a different context and also
those with the chronic fear of ever growing up. You have the honor students, who
stayed for a few years and learned what they can and then moved on, and you have
the super-seniors, still teaching English and crawling through the ex-pat bars.
We all hope to be the former, though what we learn from a modest amount of
crawling can be instructive as well.
For my first four or five months in Turkey I was almost almost
continuously depressed. I was working a shitty job and feeling very restricted,
but I was also contending with the initial, unavoidable homesickness. I was
prepared for this feeling. I had left behind a good life in Santa Cruz, the fruit of relationships and
connections grown over six years. I knew I would miss my friends, my family,
the life I had built for myself. I knew also that I would curse myself for
leaving, convince myself it had been craziness, and have to restrain myself from buying
an early ticket home. All this happened and I was ready for it when it did.
What I wasn’t prepared for was being homesick for myself.
Missing the person I was in California.
So much of who we are is related to environment, the place where we find ourselves and
the people we are surrounded by. I think there are unchanging aspects of our
characters and personalities, but these are related more to our fundamental attitude
towards life. Whereas most of our interests, concerns, and preoccupations
change countless times before we die. Sometimes we are ready to shed the old,
but don’t realize that the people or places we love are swaddling us in garments we
have outgrown. Then we are separated from those people or places and find
ourselves standing naked and cold in a new world where everything – the sun,
the wind - feels different. It’s scary and it hurts, so we find ourselves
longing to go back to the warmth and comfort of before.
But there’s no going back. I spent the first few months
growing slowly strange to myself, looking in the mirror and sometimes being
unable to recognize the person there. So much of what I concerned myself with
before seemed suddenly so pointless, so short-sighted and irrelevant. Without those props, though, I
didn’t know who I was. Eventually I began to trust, to lean into that vulnerability
and unknowing and trust that by letting go of who I was before I was making room
from someone new to arrive.
It wasn’t all easy, and I spent a lot of time alone at home confused,
or drinking more than I ever have before, not giving a damn, partying until the
first ezan and then working ten
hours. And a lot of it was perfect and blissful and fun – so many incredible
and memorable nights with my best friends - but some of it was just treading
water in the dark. Trying to escape the unknowing. But if I still don’t know
totally who I am or what I want (who does?) I at least know more about what I’m not. I
left a lot of things behind in California
and I realize now that it was time. Living thousands of miles away showed me
who I am when everything I know has disappeared, about what remains, my core, the
still point in the spinning. And as gravity begins to settle around me and
objects fall into their proper place, I hope I can continue moving in this
knowledge, the knowledge that living so far from everything helped me to gain.
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