A Series of Days

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Reverse culture shock has been a regular visiter at my apartment this summer.

In my opinion, culture shock (or reverse culture shock, for that matter), is not the surprise of first arriving to a place, but rather occurs six to eight weeks (give or take) after getting to a place. It's around this time when everything that was new and exciting and novel and quaint becomes reality. It's this point when you realize that this isn't somewhere you're visiting, it's somewhere you're living. The quaint and fascinating can become annoying, and the people with whom you were fascinated (or who were fascinated in you) become less fascinating (or fascinated). It's when you start to realize that you're all alone and perhaps that people don't understand you. It's a lonely time, and it sucks, to put it mildly.

I've been trying to deal with the reverse culture shock without being annoying, but I have started to get the feeling of being alone. In Mumbai, all my friends were in the same boat. We were all from different places and trying to deal with the idiosyncracies of a new place. Because of that commonality, we understood each other and each other's frustrations. Here, I feel India has become exactly what I feared it would: a sound byte.

Now that I have returned, it seems that many of my friends are considering leaving. My best friend Beth called me from the airport as she was embarking on a year of teaching English in South Korea. She was nervous about going for a whole year, and I remembered sitting on the airplane on my way to Frankfurt, trying to hide my tears from the flight attendant and the girl next to me. All I could think of was the year stretched out ahead of me like a dragon's back, and the idea of all those days frightened me. I learned that the way to think of it was not as a whole year, but as a series of days. That way every time I woke up, all I had to get through was that day, and it seemed so much more doable.

Here as well I try to look at my life as a series of days. It keeps me from feeling too tied down to school, work, home, etc. It's funny, when I was leaving Mumbai I wanted nothing more than a place that was my own, in which I could stay for more than 2 months at a time. Now that I have that (I just signed the lease agreement for a place on Chester for the next year), I want nothing more than to pick up and go adventuring again. I know, it seems I'm pretty fickle, and I don't mean it like that at all. It's just that now, even more than before my trip, I fear growing stagnant and not living abroad again.

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