For the most part, this blog has been more information than personal. I mean, it has a lot of personal observations and my take on a lot of things, but as far as inner thoughts and personal reactions to this trip thus far, there aren’t many.
Before I left home, my girlfriend broke up with me. We both (at the time) wanted it to be temporary, and I still have hope that it will be. She said something that at the time hurt me so badly. She said she wanted to see who I was when I got back. I didn’t understand. I didn’t realize how much I had changed in the four years she had known me.
She gave me this beautiful opportunity to go away from everything. I have some guilt that I wanted so badly to get away from parenting, relationships, the stress of worrying about everything every minute of everyday. I can’t explain it any better than to say life was strangling me slowly. I just wanted to breathe. I wanted so badly to breathe. She knew and she gave me this.
As strange as it sounds, even to my own ears, I spend a lot of time alone and for the most part I enjoy it. When I have a down day or even moment, I reach out and talk to people or try to leave the solitude of my existence. I have never been able to do that before. I still have anxiety about new things, but I am in this world and I don’t know when I will get back, and I will get back to Europe and Egypt and the world, so I do the things that make me nervous. I go to a club in Berlin, I begged to stay in Cairo even though it was terrifying. I totally reset all my plans of learning Arabic, which I still want to do, and am learning German so I wouldn’t have to go home without living this.
I wrote goodbye letters to most of the people I know when I was in Cairo and the riots were on the island. I didn’t think I would ever need to send them, but the writing made me realize how many things I left unsaid. It made me realize that I don’t want to apologize to my kids for mistakes, I just don’t want to make them. I want them to have happy memories like so many that I have with my mom and I know she didn’t have an easy time raising us.
I also realized how much pain I was holding onto and I don’t know why I was. I am thirty years old and I think at least once a day about how awful I felt all the time in high school. I remember everyday that I was told every single day how unworthy I was of friends and respect by people who didn’t feel that they did and were using me to make themselves feel superior. And I let them make me feel that way. I even absorbed it and started believing it myself. I remember a moment when I was 19 and engaged to my ex husband when I asked his dad if he was saving a snack for later when he dropped a chip on his shirt which was a silly little joke in my family, and he got offended and asked me why I was so rude. That was eleven almost twelve years ago. I agonize over it. It’s ridiculous.
I know my best friend/ex-girlfriend loves me. I know she never lies to me. I still find myself wondering if she doesn’t really care about me or if I am just convenient at the moment. I know I played the primary role in us breaking up, but I also play things prior to our break up through my head and theorize about other reasons we might have broken up. I wonder if she suddenly realized that she had gotten in over her head when she had told me that one tipsy night, when we first got to New Orleans, that she wanted to marry me. All this is me not thinking I am deserving and begging for her to love me when she already does. I feel so foolish for not knowing. It was never about her and always about me not knowing my own value.
I walk around Quedlinburg, existing only in my head. I take a deep breath and God, it feels so good to breathe. I smile to myself stand up straight and move forward. My life hurts sometimes, but so does everyone elses’. I have realized, in being here, that it’s okay to love me. I walk around seeing all these things I love. These beautiful buildings, all the history, the motivation of these people to rebuild after one of the most devastating wars in history. We have no idea of what these people went through after the war. We were bombed once during the war.
Last night I went out with the other students, and though I know I am outside a little merely because of my age and life circumstance, I am one of them and I have friends. I get to have friends. I get to laugh and tease and not wonder if the joke made at my expense was a jab or if it was a joke, because it was a joke. I get to laugh at myself without denigrating myself and I get to tease and laugh with my friends.
I am stronger. When I walk into a room, it isn’t a fake bravado. Frau Merchant says that if you can put that persona on when you walk into a place then that person is in you somewhere. You can’t access something that doesn’t exist. She’s right.
Learning German is difficult. I spend a good chunk of my time baffled and feeling unintelligent, but I have done harder things. Knowing all the things about myself now has brought me a long way. It doesn’t mean I will never have a moment of weakness and it doesn’t mean that the voice isn’t still in my head telling me all the negatives and stressing me out. It just means I can tell it to shut up. I get to do that.
Being here, living here, having time alone in my head has been such a gift. I don’t think that anyone can comprehend what I am saying because they aren’t me. I just know that I would have never been able to do this for myself without help. I needed the support, love, and open window to make it okay.
No comments:
Post a Comment