A trip back to India after three years
was what I had dreaded for a solid six month prior to even booking the flights.
I was around 14 when we last visited, and even back then, for a strong
opinionated but anxiety driven adolescent, being forced into situations that
you associated with discomfort, and having to live with your extended family
that you’d never been close, was not far from my description of hell on Earth.
It wasn’t hard to figure out that there
is not only a huge difference in how you perceive the world from when you’re in
your early teens, to how that differs from the composition of thoughts and
feelings as an adult but also how people perceive you and frame their
understanding of who you are and who you’ve become.
Three years is an extremely long time
and you don’t always stay connected to family members that you didn’t grow up
around or had connections to, only meeting them ever so often when you go back
for an occasion, and then too only for a couple of weeks; and when people are
quick to assume how foreign countries may have shaped and changed you, it
doesn’t leave much room to fit in or adjust. And so, going back for me might as
well have been comparable to living with a new exchange family every few years
or so, because by the time your next visit rolls around, you’ve changed so much
as a person and so much has happened in their lives too, that it’s almost as if
you don’t even know them, except maybe the basics that were discussed on the
itinerary.
Upon arriving back from India, to my family
house in Perth, I had a few days before I had to leave for Melbourne again. I
was overcome with this gust of sombre at the realisation that the trip had
played out pretty well and I had actually managed to enjoy myself. I had
survived to tell the tale despite predicting otherwise; however, concurrently I
sensed this pit in my stomach raging at me to deal with the conflict that had
been fuelling itself for the past few years. Sparking conflict, making me
uneasy, itching away and prickling at the desire to almost abandon my flesh,
the only constant I’ve ever had, and to allow myself to question my identity
and to feel pain and confusion, but to tackle my emotions and separate them
from reality, to find some sort of peace.
I’m sure those who’ve been in similar
situations; growing up in different parts of the world, constantly on the move,
new cities, new schools, meeting and trying to fit in with new people and
adapting to new lifestyles, cultures, and norms, will agree that it all leaves
you a bit dazed. It’s almost like you’ve been continuously floating, like your
feet never really have had the chance to touch the ground or feel the soil
because as soon as you’re able to descend, whoop! It’s time to take off again.
Life becomes a blur, like your private montage with brief snippets of all the
new places, homes, people, schools, cultures and experiences all collided
together to form you.
This fast-paced and ever-changing
lifestyle had set me up with a constant state of numb and then to suddenly feel
so intensely, was overwhelming, to say the least. It didn’t take long to
conclude that I belonged nowhere and I hadn’t formed a stable identity. The
shift from places within India, to my move to South Africa, and then Australia
counting Perth and Melbourne, left little description of ‘home’ for me. There
had been no place I had a connection to or formed a bond with. No childhood
friends or memories with people that I still knew to this day. No place to call
my own, no place that could call me theirs’.
The more I let this settle in, the more
distressing it got. I started to compare myself to others, my friends who got
excited as the semester ended to go back ‘home’, be in their elements and see
their friends and family who they’d known all their lives I started to envy
people who’d also recently just moved Melbourne but would tell me about how
things were back ‘home’ and how they missed the comfort of that. It made me
jealous how other students in my tutes would introduce themselves, saying that
they’d lived here all their lives and knew all about the place. It led me down
a period where I had pondered and become so frustrated with my self- diagnosed
identity of ‘lost and confused’ that it turned into anger and frustration.
A few weeks ago, my friend invited me and
our other friend over for dinner. We ate and had a couple of drinks and we
talked. I told them about what had been going on inside my head, revealing how
I felt that the constant instability in my life had led me to lose my self-
identity or ability to connect with a place or person or memory, stealing my
chance to understand my own character. They let me explain this for a bit, me
pouring out all that I felt had led me to this state and after a brief moment
of silence, one of them simply said “But maybe that’s you, that’s who you are,
that’s your identity.”
I let that sink it in for a second, it
was the first time I had nothing to say back to or comment on, nothing to add to
or argue against, nothing to say “it’s more complicated than that” to, because
at that moment I realised that my character and identity had all along really
just been a product of all the experiences that I initially thought were the
reason to why I couldn’t form one.
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"But who am I?" was published in Esperanto Magazine, Global Edition!
Here are some pics, as usual.
