J-complex in B-overly so

I am not the person who stepped off the plane last August, for better and for worse. I've lost some of me and gained some parts I never knew were there. I'm less confident that what I'm doing - at any given time - is the right thing (and I never needed any help in the overthinking department). I'm less conviction driven. I often feel (and fear) I am less intellectually curious. Emotionally...I am all over the place.

I feel more like a global citizen - a certain inherent respect for the places I've seen and will see. I have a greater comprehension of the little underlying differences that most tourists never see. I've finally started questioning what I want to receive validation from, and not just seeking it from safe though ultimately unfulfilling sources. After several years of hiding from the New York social scene to avoid the awkward silences people gave me when they learned I was still getting my BA (after which I often took pride in introducing them to some intellectual whoop ass), I feel like I am finally honoring that extroverted and social part of me that was trying to claw her way out (I mean, I wasn't online earlier and a friend texted me to ask if I was ok. Um, yeah. Chat addict.).

Through the process of becoming both bigger and smaller, I have also become - a bit to my own dismay - more complicated. As I speak I add clauses and qualifiers to nearly everything. God help me if I learn to footnote my blog entries! We are a product of our environment though, and this is a complex one indeed. No one fully understands this experience like another volunteer, but speaking to someone about your complaints or fears or secrets opens the highway for gossip and misinterpretation. Having issue with another volunteer, something bound to happen, is the worst. Something that would typically be a personal issue - sometimes very personal - and would rest with close, trusted friends has no place to call home. Keeping the feelings and quips internalized isn't healthy, and your choices of who to lean on are those in the distance (and with great distance from your present life) or those who are also the friends, colleagues and support of the other. There are no noble or right options there. Throw in some emotional instability (often towing her ugly friend Bad Judgment) and confusion and you may very well have a disaster.

I came here to make mistakes and test who I am. I just wanted to do it tucked away, in a provincial environment. One that somehow managed to not to close in on itself. I want this to be both smaller and bigger.

The Ultimate Answer: 42

College philosophers may sit around and discuss what the meaning of life is, but Peace Corps volunteers sit around and ask their own unanswerable question: why do we stay? I've never met someone with a good answer and last night, a friend and I went into another round of questioning this only to conclude (seriously): we want our moms. It's so adventurous, eh?

Like philosophers, we tend to construct more questions than answers. The questions are something like: What would we go back to? Where would we go? Would I be abandoning people here? Would I be a failure? What am I missing here? Would I be missing it someplace else? Am I sacrificing something by leaving? By staying? What did I come here to do? Have I done it? Why did I even think this was a good idea in the first place? Is there a secret (besides alcohol)? Can I have it? What if we just all left en masse?

Why do I stay? I really don't know. I think about it often. About leaving too. What would it take for me to call it quits? Up until last week I couldn't visualize the process of leaving, that's how I knew I wouldn't. But, suddenly, it seemed easy to take stock of what in the apartment was worthy of being taken back and a bus ride to the Peace Corps office followed by the simple phrase "I want a ticket home" seemed like a clear and simple solution. Seeing that made finding the answer to the question that much harder.

I look forward to things here, but they are mainly times with other American friends. Like an 80s factory worker waiting to be rescued, I live for the weekends. That's when I see people and get out. That's when I connect. Being stuck at home for the last two weeks (and weekends) has not been good on the ol' psyche. Once those things I look forward to disappear, the lack of answer to The Question becomes all too nagging. Two weeks of being sick and nagged can make anyone bitchy.

There are times when the question disappears, I guess those times are the answers. Those times are always centered on really good times with friends. I don't know why I stay in the larger sense, but in a day-to-day sense I stay for them. I stay because there are good people here - good people who are my life rafts. Every day I, and many other volunteers, board a sinking ship because we know there are life rafts. Seems like an odd reason to climb aboard, eh?

New York State of Mind indeed...

A hard day's night

Some days your life does not seem your own. None of your clothes are what you'd pick to wear. Nothing in your apartment seems like it should belong to you. The food in the fridge seems like it was picked for another girl's palate. The music you own seems like it's almost right. Your friends seem like obligatory postcards instead of the warm, inspiring letters they usually are. Some days everything is...off.

Today, if you couldn't guess, is one of those days. A day when nothing really seems funny or light and everything conveys meaning to your subconscious in a way your self-respecting conscious mind says "no, seriously...where'd you get that?!" There's a storm that keeps passing over town. It rumbles and looks like it's about to pour but never does. Today's sort of like that. I wish it would just storm like hell or pass, but instead everything just kind of lingers and leaves me waiting for the verdict. That's what's driving me mad about today. I feel like it's a waiting day, that there are outcomes out of my control that could seriously impact my life and I can't do much about them.

I've never been a bystander in my own life - I've done all I could to not be that. I've made choices and sacrifices that, in the end, I seriously doubted or even regretted but I always knew they were mine. There's something about Peace Corps that makes you feel like you become just that - a bystander. You're given a town, a job and an apartment. Your job? Stay. It's like I left the country and became a dog. I'd love to be in a car right now driving the country roads with some music turned up loud enough for it to take over my head. But I can't drive here. I'd love to be someplace better, fuller. I'd love for my friends to not all be hours away. But reality is something different. Something so much different. Too much different.

I was listening to Billy Joel (see, I told you my music selection was off - I sunk to Billy Joel!) earlier. When you're from New York, one of the worst songs to hear on a hard day is "New York State of Mind". It somehow captures how you are feeling and makes you want to run to the nearest airport. I wonder why I am here. Why I stay. Why I know I have talents and skills that would get me a job almost anywhere I wanted and yet I don't go. I wonder how long it would take to pack all this stuff. How much would I want to take anyway? I wonder how many people would care; how long it would take people to notice if I didn't tell them. I wonder in 5 years if I'd regret staying or leaving more.

I just want answers. And to have my life stop feeling so damn affected by external changes. I want to stop feeling like a basketcase all the time. I was to stop feeling like an egg, kept together only by a thin shell - one that with the smallest crack sends me uncontrollably splattered all over the place. I want to stop feeling so alone.

The rain's started, which means the internet will go soon. Be careful what you wish for.

Danish life and color...just hours from Bulgaria

Finders keepers?

What seems like a million years ago, but was really more like a week, I was in Copenhagen. I was sitting by bodies of water, reading and sipping mochas between long strolls in some of the most livable neighborhoods imaginable. I was just doing whatever I wanted to do...living life on my own time. Only vacations aren't life. They're a whirlwind romance with a potential life where everything is new and fresh and exciting. In short: it's false. Like all romances though, it's an intoxicating falseness. If not resisting is part of the fun, I had an amazing time.

Keeping consistent with myself, though, I knew even as I was sampling the cafes and tucked away boutiques that while it would be fun to live in Copenhagen (and I would seriously jump at the chance) I couldn't possibly do it for more than a couple of years. It's not that the romance would wear off - there was some substance to my love of the place (clean, diverse, amazing mass transit, bicycle and pedestrian friendly, loads of young - or whatever I am now - professionals living healthy lifestyles, water everywhere) - but there's an acknowledgement that I need to be challenged and pushed and, in many ways, made uncomfortable. I like to grow and I need those things to do so. With that in mind, I knew that Copenhagen could never be my long-term home. The full realization that I was spending a life running from comfort was a bit saddening, though it helped explain some random life choices. By the end I really envied the couples having quiet dinners and wine with friends. Not because they had it and I didn't, but because it filled them in a way it never would fill me. I know I can't live the simple life, but like vacation spots, it was fun to romanticize that I could and that fullness was something I could find - it's why I used to eat so much...a search for fullness of any kind.

I returned to a rather easy adjustment - an evening and day in Bulgaria's capital city with my friend Megan where we stayed up and swapped tales until we just couldn't say one more syllable and then woke up to go to coffee and repeat. Sometime between our chats and laughs and my return to my apartment (which no longer held the sense of home it had when I left) I caught a cold that turned into bronchitis. In addition to being one of the worst welcome home gifts I could have imagined, it cancelled my trip to Turkey and helped smack me against the Bulgarian quasi-reality wall with astonishing speed. Suddenly my movements were restricted and I felt like hell. Everywhere I went with my sneezing and coughing I was looked at like a walking virus. All the feelings of imprisonment and discontent I left behind were somehow transformed with the volume turned to "head rattling". Going from Copenhagen to this was simply whiplash.

So, I am here in my apartment just before dusk on a night begging for a long stroll, because I can't breath so well and I can't be away from a pot of tea for more than about 30 minutes. I sit here and not in Istanbul with friends because the bus ride was just too long as was the risk of additional attackers on my weak immune system. I suddenly feel just that: weak. And alone. Like the world is too much for me, and too little. Like I need to figure out how to accept a life of quiet dinners and find contentment in cafes. I feel like a duck, one being prepared for the dinner table but still dreaming of southern migration. I just want to be someplace and be happy that I'm there - to have it be real and without qualifiers - even if it's only for a little while. I know my fullness doesn't last, I just want to be big enough to find it...and still dream of being small enough to keep it.