A long transition

I found a succinct way to define to an expat friend of mine what it felt like for me to move to the States back in 2009.  I thought it worth sharing.

When we moved to Baltimore it felt like I was torn from my identity.  I lost a lot of what it meant to be me.

I was suddenly a wife.  I was no longer a teacher.  I wasn't a Kiwi in the sense that everybody around me was Kiwi: how I spoke and acted was now alien.  I no longer had music groups to be involved in.  I lost my church family, all my close friends, and my family no longer lived nearby.  My sole job was suddenly to support Jbird: a job nobody could tell me how to do, or train me through a degree into.  I didn't have an income or even a car.  We lived in a tiny apartment where I spent 80% of my time watching American cable TV and baking.  The ocean was there (though it isn't here) but it wasn't swim-able, there was certainly no surfing.  All of my everyday stuff was an ocean or two away, I had just a suitcase of clothes and a viola.  People assume that because our skin is white and we speak English, our culture is very similar to the American culture so they expect us to just blend in.  But it's not, and it's hard to.

It was quite different from moving to Bangladesh back in 2005.  The Bangladesh move was a great adventure.  It had an intended time frame.  I had an identity in my teaching and being completely surrounded by other expats so that my expat-ness was normal.  I had a means of supporting myself.  It was hard, but now I think it was hard in an easier way.

I don't write this to complain.  I write this to express myself, I feel almost freed by this realisation.  Of course everything is different now, I have reshaped myself and life doesn't feel so hard, or the amount of hardness in my life is a more ordinary amount.