As a 46 year-old expat who’s lived outside for 12 years, I have designed my life in order for the world to get larger and larger. Something in my nature not only detests a small, insular world, but is also made ill by it.
Lately, with the COVID measures, and a second move in a three-year timespan, I find myself in a very small world. No local friends, yet. Thanks to regulations and mask wearing (that is inherently antisocial and fueling of suspicion more than connection). Indeed, all my allies live on the other side of screens and apps. The best of them perched in Spain, Florida, Athens, Doha. All of them expats as well. Thank goodness for technology. Yet, as I had predicted, I am mentally suffering from this situation.
When I lived in Qatar, I traveled minimum every two months. Even if only a short hop to Dubai. This kept me sane, because the bubble of expat gossip, strange politics and clashing cultures was a big pressure. And leaving it, even for a weekend, a huge relief and reconnection with myself and my own perspective.
I actually suffer a problem where I consider all other perspectives so much that mine is usually considered last … I don’t need to be lectured, which I often am, about other perspectives. I need to find my own faster and not only state it but live by it more than the static around me. I think anyone abused as a child (quite a few people) can relate to this bolded statement. Because we developed this trait of tuning into others to survive, and it’s super difficult to switch off even if you have found balance in life otherwise.
I know things will change. My world will grow again. But holy shit this is hard. I haven’t been home in two years. I don’t miss it for reasons people might project on the situation to believe.
I miss it because it’s somewhere else. And seeing people I haven’t seen in a long time will expand my horizons once again. I miss it because my grandma died and we had a f*cking zoom funeral for her (a woman I am sure would have packed the church out to the sidewalk) and a lot of us couldn’t get to her grave for more than a year.
And some of us need to be like elephants and go back to the place someone beloved died and just sit there a while. It’s important.
I miss it because the ocean is a game of telephone and I want to see people with my own eyes and know how they are doing and remember myself through them a little (not a lot anymore but enough). I don’t really miss what people give me there — except two of my sisters and may aunt — because they don’t give me much. In fact, they take a lot of everything from me.
Moreso the place takes as much as it gives since all my favorite places are bought out by chains. And more poverty and political division has sprung from the problematic roots that alienated me in the first place. And everyone and their automated lawnmower has a gun.
So, in conclusion, I guess mostly I miss it because it’s somewhere else. And because it is only an imagination after two years and I need it to be a reality somehow.
Did I mention? The people I work with here in Switzerland are also a lot younger than me. This is yet another shrinking of worlds that I could easily handle if I had backup friends locally. But I don’t. I have to pretend, every day, that I don’t have the life experience I’ve had in order to fit in socially with these people. Sure, I love them … they’re super intelligent and great. Really. I see who they are and admire many things about them.
But they are young er, younger. I think you have to get up to the middle point on life’s ladder to see that there are a lot of things you did to get there.
I open my mouth to speak very carefully and sometimes trespass their understanding and have to backpedal or shut right the fuck up before completing thoughts — like a car screeches to a halt at the edge of a cliff. Those moments are themselves intensely emotionally precarious and self deprecating. Stress. Every day is a toe-stubbing experience at best, an identity crisis at worst. And I don’t have a happy hour with anyone except my dear, patient husband, when he is here, to diffuse all the pressure of that with. (I think he will be canonized as a saint next year by the way — stay tuned for invites to the ceremony.)
Funny-not-funny. I made the mistake of opening up to a younger colleague last week about an emotionally immature colleague’s actions and was told to read a self-help book and consider others and “act like an adult and talk it out” and think positive. I used to say stupid sh*t like that to people when I was that age (I mean not the “act like an adult” part because I’m not a millennial and I respect people out of fear (?) but anyway). And I really believed I was helping them. Anyway, I am not faulting her. But it’s really a knife when you are older. God. Parents are martyrs.
I digress. I used to balance out my professional life by teaching yoga part time. Now all the studios around me go bankrupt and kick out the teachers who don’t need the money, i.e., people like me. This sucks too. It’s business. It’s natural. It’s natural business.
Whatever. This has been a rant. A massive first-world-problem rant. I wasn’t sick with COVID. Most of my family and friends have been spared. I have a job. I have a loving husband and a heart-warming cat. I have a future.
But this is just one way to express something that maybe a few other people feel, in part. And if you feel any of it, at least you know you’re not alone.
