Sunday, April 11, 2010
Going to reveal a bit of my soul here and I’m not sure how comfortable I am with that or how this affects anything but kind of just need a venue to think some things out and I like to stay honest on here about the reality of this experience from my perspective. I can’t say I really know what I’m aiming for here other than just an excuse to sit down and think some thoughts through that have been floating around in my head for far too long now. But hey, what the hell? It’s not like I’m not thinking them and I don’t know how having others know them will make anything change but here’s a way to find out.
Survived six months here now as of about a week ago though I don’t recall if I really did anything special to celebrate. It’s hard to believe it’s been a week since that but at the same time it makes perfect sense with the pace life is going right now. 12 weeks is a really square number that makes it easy to turn life into fractions. I’ve been in Arusha already for a month with three weeks done already at my internship. That’s a quarter of the thing done in a flash like that. By the end of this week, it’ll already be a third of the way and then only two weeks after that I’ll be blowing past the halfway mark. That’s just the way my head is thinking right now.
If it hasn’t been plainly clear through my writings on here before, let me state this explicitly now that I am a very future-oriented person. For about a year and a half before I left for Tanzania, I couldn’t stop thinking about study abroad. In fact, I was even skipping that whole year and the next and thinking about life in the Peace Corps after graduation. Now that I’m here though and I start to see previously lain plans get altered (point and case: this internship rather than a second semester at UDSM,) but I haven’t stopped thinking about the future any less. It’s probably likely that I’ve been thinking about it even more than ever before. For example, I think about home… a lot…
Even though six months isn’t really that long of a time in the grand scheme of things and it never has been before, six months away from home in Tanzania have been remarkably different in terms of how I think, feel, act, and even just perceive the world. I don’t always think I’ve changed a lot because I always imagine the scenario where I’m hanging out with my friends back at home and I can’t imagine myself being any different around them just because that’s the way it has always been. This make-believe situation is significantly different than the reality though in terms of how I am and how I feel. I can say truthfully that I don’t feel like myself often and this is something that was especially true when I was in Dar es Salaam. I feel like I got on quite well with most of my peers as far back as preschool and always wound up in the same sort of role but when I was in Dar, I was taken so completely out of my element that I completely lost any anchor I had, finding myself in unfamiliar waters filling an unfamiliar role. Things are definitely better here, but it’s been a rough process learning that not everything about my personality translates perfectly into another culture and setting or gels well with a group of 10 other random strangers.
I’ve been feeling a lot more like myself since I left that school behind and it’s generally a positive thing in terms of my mental health but even now that I’m much more comfortable in my own skin and in this environment that feels a little less foreign, I’m finding a lot of things missing that were pretty essential to who I used to be and who people know me as back home. It’s hard to pinpoint what exactly they are, but I think it’s just another situation of these things just not making sense in a different context. Also, it’s a lot different to be a gangly blonde guy in Eugene compared to Arusha, I’ll say that. But what I’m trying to get across here is really something like three completely different points that I seem to have started and have yet to finish.
The first is home. I’ve had this thought for months now actually and I think it’s especially true now that things happen like my friends moving locations or definitely with my parents redoing the deck (do we still have the broken hot tub?) Home to me, in the physical sense, exists a certain way with objects and smells and people and everything fixed. What I acknowledge is that this is completely imaginary to me at this point and there are obviously going to be some things that have changed or just aren’t the way that I imagine them. This will lead to some confusion, no doubt.
The second is time. I realize everyday that a larger distance in terms of time is being put between me and my life back in Oregon and this is most clearly evidenced in my loss of memory. I forget more and more each day about how things were said, how things were, or even some basic things like who I even used to hang out with. The point I was trying to make earlier is that six months in a place that you’ve always known, following a path you have always expected to take, and amongst the company that makes so much sense there is considerably different when completely uprooted from all of that. It’s unreal to me that this has only been six months. It seems like it has been years and I feel like I matured more in my first three months in Tanzania than I did in the prior three years (though admittedly I was getting less mature in some respects during that time period – see Bob Dylan’s ‘My Back Pages’ once again…) I feel like I’m changing quite a bit even from just two months ago and a lot of it is just due to environment. Like right now with my internship, I’m having to be extremely professional and adult in comparison with how I used to live and I’m finding it difficult to adapt though it kind of scares me to realize the changes and feel like such an old man. It’s strange to think that if I never would have come here, this would have been six more months like any other for me but instead it has been a whirlwind. As short of a time period as it really is, it feels like years when I look back even on events earlier this year.
The third aspect was just a sense of self. This actually ties together the previous two things quite well in that I lose not only memories of home but even of my first couple months here. Am I shedding these memories as a way of moving on and leaving this old life behind? I’m quite confident that if I went back and read some of my early blog posts from when I arrived in Tanzania, I would feel like I am reading about someone else’s life. It could even been ones from just January even. That’s insane to me. At home, time moves with little change and I can recall events from even years earlier with relative clarity because it makes sense that I lived my life that way. Now, these memories just don’t make any sense when placed in this context. To be able to walk the streets as just any other white guy is a completely different state of mind than I’ve been in for what feels like a very long time. Even the sensation of riding my bike feels more foreign to me now than getting a big plate of meat and deep-fried bananas here. There’s definitely going to be some adjustment involved. There already has been some, actually, as going from student, to confused/depressed/estranged student, to traveler, and now to employee. Moving from role to role with a change of location, climates, communities, environments, and even identities. This has been unbelievable. Unlike anything I’ve ever experienced before.
I’m embarrassed to have the bravado to continually be writing statements like that but that’s just the nature of who I am and how this has been. So future-oriented, through and through, that I reflect back on this as if it’s something of the distant past even though it is still happening. It still happens now, just like it did yesterday, and just like it will tomorrow. Time is flying, but I wage war with impatience like it’s going out of style.
Here comes the absolute heart of the matter. The heart. I’m still obsessed with this girl. Even though I’m in a much better state about this than I was before, it doesn’t change everything. I can’t stop thinking ahead and as I get closer to the end of this, it’s not getting any easier to stop thinking about what’s coming. This isn’t the same future that I think about than other things though… oh not at all. I’m much more willing to part with other bold dreams and aspirations than with this one. Everything about this just seems so much more dire. There are so many variables and unknowns involved. There’s too much fate involved whereas everything else was just a matter of hard work and time. This one’s not about will or about determination or about trying again if mistakes are made. This stakes feel a lot higher than with anything else either. This one matters a lot more. I’m probably just looking at it the wrong way, but if you see it like this then it’s impossible not to worry and stress.
I can here the “don’t worry about it” coming now but you know that this blog has never been about that. Just as always, this is not a cry for help or for sympathy, just an insight into the way the human mind really works. It’s education not desperation. I have to muster a bit of courage to be so revealing sometimes but I like to be truthful and let people know the reality. So please, unless you want to make it even more difficult to write freely on here, don’t offer sympathy or psychiatric assistance.
Here’s one last and final truth that I’ll leave you with for the night. I know that all of these things are going to be figured out sooner or later and that time is the real final decider in all of this. I remember this often and it does help me to be more patient (don’t think I’ve forgotten my new year’s resolutions!) I’m doing quite fine here and am generally enjoying the way things are going right now. I appreciate my time here and am happy to be here at this point in my life. Thoughts like all of these above do indeed come up often, but it’s good to finally take the time to sit down, write them out, and just have them arranged in a way that at least would make sense in a second draft. If you want to know what living in Tanzania has been like for me, well, there it is.
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