…and you don’t stop.

The past couple of weeks have been amazing and at the same time a lot to digest.  I think it’s natural that at any point in this life we come across that age old question: What am I doing with my life?  I too am in this boat right now, along with what seems to be the majority of my peers.  Let’s take my life as case study, shall we?

Stats: 22 year old Northeastern Graduate, with honors.  Worked for Boston’s top entertainment/hospitality/PR companies and produced shows for Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week, but still can’t get a good job.  [awesome]

Desires: Would ideally love to move back to NYC and get back in to the fashion circuit.  Another part of me wants to stay in Boston and try to work for the Red Sox.  15% of me wants to say “EFF THIS” and just move to the Vineyard for the rest of my life where things are more simple.  And then there’s everything in my being that wants nothing more than to move back to Europe and find a synthesis for all my heart’s desires.

The Rest: Since moving back to the States it’s been sincerely hard for me to feel as if I’m “home”.  While I was in Miami over New Year’s with the girls from Paris who I absolutely adore, we were lounging poolside when one of them threw me the latest issue of The Economist.  Inside was an article that describes exactly how I feel about being back, entitled “The Others.”  One part in particular hit home the most:

For the real exile, foreignness is not an adventure but a test of endurance. The Roman poet Ovid, banished to a dank corner of the empire, complained that exile was ruining him “as laid-up iron is rusted by scabrous corrosion/or a book in storage feasts boreworms”. Edward Said, a Jerusalem-born Palestinian-American scholar, caught the romance and pain of exile when he called it “a strangely compelling idea, but a terrible experience”. The true exile, he said, was somebody who could “return home neither in spirit nor in fact”, and whose achievements were “permanently undermined by the loss of something left behind for ever”.

The willing foreigner is in exactly the reverse position, for a while at any rate. His enjoyment of life is intensified, not undermined, by the absence of a homeland. And the homeland is a place to which he could return at any time.

The funny thing is, with the passage of time, something does happen to long-term foreigners which makes them more like real exiles, and they do not like it at all. The homeland which they left behind changes. The culture, the politics and their old friends all change, die, forget them. They come to feel that they are foreigners even when visiting “home”. Jhumpa Lahiri, a British-born writer of Indian descent living in America, catches something of this in her novel, “The Namesake”. Ashima, who is an Indian émigré, compares the experience of foreignness to that of “a parenthesis in what had once been an ordinary life, only to discover that the previous life has vanished, replaced by something more complicated and demanding”.

I didn’t leave Boston on great terms and it feels like I came back to an even harder set of circumstances.  Boston and America in general did not have the charm or life that it once held in my eyes and in my heart.  I had to burn every bridge when I left Boston, so it was like starting over in the worst way possible.  Moreover, I had built a life in Paris and quite a stable one at that with amazing people, traditions and routines that I still dream about on a daily basis.   That anxiety, coupled with the stress of senior year and graduating, has left me feeling lost.

Something funny happened to me last week.  My friend Aly asked me to assist her at her job.  She works at an international organization that helps displaced refugees in 3rd world countries make a life here in America.  The family she was picking up at Logan that evening was from the Congo–Lord knows what they witnessed down there.  They didn’t speak english and she needed someone to go with her to translate their French and help get them settled in to their apartment in Lynn.  I graciously accepted to volunteer and assist.  As we greeted them in Logan they looked as they had been traveling for days.  A family of 8 (six of them children) and each family member had one bag.  Not one suitcase, one bag with a zipper on it.  That’s it.

Seeing that struck a chord in my heart that has refused to cease from resonating.  I know I have a lot of stuff, but seeing everything first hand put such a great perspective and knocked me back in to reality.  Granted, I’m in fashion and PR so naturally I have to have a lot of clothing and accessories due to my job description, but I could easily fit all my shoes in to two bags.  Watching them was emotionally draining and rewarding all at the same time.  I don’t know how Aly does it on a daily basis.  The kids were so excited they couldn’t stop tackling me and tickling me.  The smile on their faces showed they didn’t have a care in the world, they were just happy to be.  That innocence children hold is so precious.  The father was concerned and asked a bajilliondy questions all about his children and their english lessons and schooling.

I think about them every night and wonder how they are.  On a semi-related note, my friend got into the graduate program at the institution in Paris I was at for undergraduate.  He wasn’t sure if he was going to go until I told him, “Seriously, if you don’t do this now you’ll never be able to do it again and who knows what it will bring.”   Then I thought to myself, why am I doing this?  Why can’t I give back and do something with my life that’s a little bit more emotionally rewarding than pitching a clothing line or restaurant’s new chef? More importantly, why am I not taking my own advice?!

That sealed the deal.  I’m applying to teach abroad in Bangkok for a year starting in October.

I don’t know what’s going to happen and that thrills me. Home does not feel like home anymore than it did when I returned from Paris, so why not do this adventure and see what happens.  A girl I know who went to Loyola is doing the same thing now and I see her pictures and her stories and I ache to do the same thing.  She’s been volunteering at this orphanage camp on the border of Burma and Thailand.  The children there are refugees from Burma and the majority of them even witnessed their parent’s execution.  Regardless, they still hold that laughter, that smile that brings out the preciousness involved with innocence and a hope that anything is possible.

One tiny detail that makes a huge difference is that one of my closest friends, C.O., will be joining me on the excursion.  She is in the same boat I’m in and we need something to spark our personalities back to life again.  I’m still young, the rat race can wait.  Once I’m on that fashion/PR circuit or whatever I choose, there’s not getting off it anytime soon.  I don’t want to tell my kids or grandkids I spent my 20’s going to work Monday through Friday (sometimes also Saturday and Sunday in this industry) from 9-5.  I want to tell them that I spent a year in Paris, learned yoga at a retreat in India, went sky diving over Interlaken, went scuba diving in Bali, attended a Full Moon Party and picked up snippets of Thai, Mandarin and Japanese on my travels.  The thought of being in Thailand and helping the global effort and exchange of cultures is invigorating to me.  Maybe I was put here to be a translator between cultures.  Who knows, the path might lead somewhere else I could have never dreamed of in my wildest years.  Maybe Travel Channel will ask me to join their forces and I get my own show.  All I know is that I’m excited about the opportunity that is ahead of me.  I’ll wrap it up with the ending paragraph from the article in The Economist.  If you don’t want the story spoiled, I highly recommend you cease reading here! ; )

“But we cannot expect to have it all ways. Life is full of choices, and to choose one thing is to forgo another. The dilemma of foreignness comes down to one of liberty versus fraternity—the pleasures of freedom versus the pleasures of belonging. The homebody chooses the pleasures of belonging. The foreigner chooses the pleasures of freedom, and the pains that go with them.”