What´s Normal?

This is something that I’ve been wondering about for a while now but my curiosity has been intensified with my time abroad in cultures different from my own. I remember I started thinking about it when I came home for Christmas during my first year of college in New York and home didn’t feel quite like it used to when I lived there day-to-day for the previous eighteen years. I had only been gone for two months or so, but already I had adjusted to a different life. Or perhaps I was somewhere in between my old life and my new one at school. Either way, home just didn’t feel like home anymore. I think the vast majority of Americans move at least once or twice by the time they go to college, but I had never even moved houses my entire life, let alone cities or states. I think never having had that experience of a drastic change is what made the question of what it is to be normal so conscious in my mind.

It’s weird. You leave your home for the first time and you expect time to stand still while you’re gone and for everything to be exactly as you left it, but things don’t work that way. Granted, things don’t change very quickly in Roanoke and things basically stay the same, but I think I’m speaking more to the attachment you feel to a place. Also, I think that the attachment you have to a place relies heavily on the relationships you’ve developed there. I think it’s only natural that as you move from place to place, or go from high school to college, that your current friendships begin to take precedence over your former ones and relationships tend to fade over time if you don’t keep up with them (I’m not talking about life-long friends – I mean acquaintances, people you were kind’ve friends with in high school, etc.). If you don’t believe me, simply think back over the years of your life, or the periods rather (middle school, high school, college, after college), and tell me if you’ve maintained all those friendships over all those years. It’s impossible. People come and go; there’s nothing wrong with it, that’s just the way it is. No matter how bad you want to, you can never go back to the way things were before. Our childhood homes, or at least the way we recall them, are long gone. And you can never go back to high school, although I have no idea why anyone would want to!

I’ve been blessed to have had a handful of friendships endure from elementary school and middle school to today, but I feel as though that’s the exception to the rule. We all still call Roanoke home since we haven’t technically made the transition to another permanent location, but we’re hardly ever there and never all at the same time. Between college, study abroad, grad school, and working overseas, my friends and I hardly live in Roanoke anymore, but where do we live? What’s normal for us? What’s normal for anyone? What length of time is necessary for a way of life to feel normal to someone? Will I ever feel normal in a foreign country, no matter how long I stay? How long will it take me to readjust to the States? Or will I ever? I think I may have bitten off more than I can chew with this one, but I’d like to explore it for a little while, at least until my head starts to hurt haha.

I think it’s interesting to point out that, in my opinion, it’s much easier for an expatriate to feel at home in the United States where the population is very diverse than it is for a white American like me to integrate into a homogenous country. I stick out like a sore thumb almost everywhere I travel: Africa, Asia and now Latin America. Even if I learn the language, adapt to the culture, make friends, start a family or whatever the case may be, everyone would still know that I was different. That’s not to say I wouldn’t be accepted in those places, but no one would ever believe I was from there. But what people from homogenous cultures often don’t realize is that the United States is so diverse in virtually every aspect of life that you really can’t tell if someone is a citizen or not just based on how they look. I’m not sure if my argument is that I’ll never be able to feel at home in a foreign country or simply that it would take a lot more time than it would in any random town in America. I really like it here in Costa Rica; my Spanish is coming along; I’m starting to make some friends; but I’ll always be the gringo in town haha. I guess it’s not such a bad thing.

I think that I’ll be able to get used to life in the States when I return; I think the difference will be in the way I see things. I don’t think I’ll ever again be able to subscribe to the fast-paced work, work, work lifestyle that so many Americans have. I can’t claim to be completely comfortable with the pace of life down here because it’s excruciatingly slow, but I’m slow-paced by nature and I think this pace suits me better. I also think that I’ll be more people-oriented when I return. It’s engrained into us from an early age that time is money and people rarely spend as much time as they should with their family or friends or neighbors just sitting and talking because it seems like a waste of time when you could be making money. At first it bothered me when I wanted a quick answer to a question from someone and then an hour later after drinking coffee and shooting the breeze I still didn’t have my answer. But it’s nice the way people take an interest in each other here. I’m not gonna go overboard and say that I’ll be a vegetarian by the time I get back, but my family here definitely eats a lot less meat than what I’m used to, and I’ve begun to realize that the amount we eat back home is so unnecessary. Don’t get me wrong, I love meat and there’s zero chance that I’ll refuse to eat it, but I won’t take it for granted so much. Maybe I’ll decide to eat it less often or in smaller portions or something.

Back to the original topic… maybe there is no such thing as normal. Or maybe each person has their own ‘normal’ and I just haven’t yet found mine. Certainly it’s not normal to be a Peace Corps Volunteer or to live abroad. I guess I’ll just have to settle for being different for now. Perhaps there’s something to be said for it.