Living 'Abroad' or Which Sweater Is Mine?

My husband recently asked me, ‘What were you thinking about when you were in high school?” (a question that sort of distilled down to essence in my mind) My response was that my childhood, saturated with unbounding exploration of life and world, was so deeply ingrained in my center, that I was in high school, in my thinking, the same little girl who attempted to revive fallen birds, dug in the banks of Greasy Creek, and swung the arms of Mulberry trees. My stations, locations, and companions had of course changed, but I felt fortunate that I never suffered from understanding my core self.

So, what was I thinking about?, I asked myself. I suppose, as I grew older, and moved from North Carolina to South Carolina for high school, I found myself testing what others around me were serving up as status quo. This then was my first foray into taking on an expat’s view of living, for to be an outsider anywhere requires pulling off the life sweater you’ve always worn and examining it for holes, while simultaneously seeing if this other sweater you’ve been given might be more suitable for your current climate. (To be fair, there were many times that I found myself judging those around me: what could they possibly be thinking?)

At the time, I felt shattered to be leaving my charmed life- a magical childhood world - for an unknown world, full of unknown people, doing unknown things, and thinking unknown thoughts. It felt wrong and put me so off-kilter that I would spend the next several years trying on their sweaters and eventually just amassing piles of them in the corners of my room. (Aside: I won’t dissolve into particulars, but sweaters come in the colors of everything from relationships, friendships, schooling, philosophy, politics, ethics, habits, hobbies, to taste)

But having spent those several years in life’s dressing rooms did open the door for me to venture a bit further out to bigger mirrors. And I moved, this time, a self-imposed exile: I went north. And the experience, albeit it due to age or deliberateness, was an exciting and disorienting experience, (almost akin to homeopathic succussion whereby the intense shaking of a mixture increases its nature) and through this I found more and more of myself woven into fabric I had never encountered.

——————Fast Forward (some of these omitted threads have been examined in past entries)———————-

My next move, across several water bodies and lands, found me more foreign, more outsider, more shaken. But what that shaking does is real. What that intense shaking causes is real: a falling away of any false, flimsy, fake threads that might have attached themselves onto sweater and soul. And what all of the shaking has done for me, as a lifelong expat, is shown me that although climates and surrounding change, my truest self is so intricately interwoven, that the outside traveling is almost a moot point.

In the end, I arrive at the beginning.