Blue Christmas

I am feeling melancholy this morning, largely because it's an anti-climactic Christmas.  Most of the usual family festivities were yesterday, and I'm having a fairly low-key lunch with my parents and grandma, followed later today by a train ride back to Chicago to get ready to leave for India tomorrow.  I'm feeling less eager than usual to go to India, and I can understand why.  It is my first visit since my five-month stay earlier this year, and I came out of that feeling like I had survived rather than thrived in Mumbai.  I also just finished a pretty dark book set in Mumbai in which the worst of rat-race human nature was in full force - the same sort of forces that turn me off to living there myself.  And then there's my apprehension about going for the wedding of my guy's sister - he's been busy and his calls have been less reliable than usual, and I'm not sure just how out of place I'm going to feel during all of the family chaos.  I'm staying with neighbors who are friends of his family since the family house will be full, so I'm afraid I'm going to feel like a total outsider.  I also just don't really feel like going on another long solo journey - I dread my consecutive flights of 12, 5 1/2, and 2 hours, followed by a 2-3 hour car ride, followed by disorientation, exhaustion, and feeling overwhelmed.  And I don't want to deal with all of the last-minute details (paying rent, calling my bank, packing, making sure I don't show up without at least some small gifts of thanks for my hosts...) before taking off.  Whine, whine, whine.  Bleh.

Probably because I've got so much anxiety about my life for the next...well, foreseeable future, I am also feeling my sense of disappointment in humanity amplified.  The book I just finished didn't help.  The neighbors in a housing society end up killing an old man who was once their friend and mentor, because if he doesn't go for the huge payout that a developer is offering to move out of their building and let it be demolished for a new luxury high rise, then nobody else can get the money either.  And the crazy thing to me is, it just seems like an extreme consequence of people applying the common logic of operating always in their own self interest.  I want us to be better, to have consciences and an interest for the greater good.  Even Christmas seems taken over by people's interest in buying and consuming, and it's hard to imagine what it would look like if you took out all of the things money can buy.  Where's the joy?  Where's the real commitment to peace and connection with other people?  And what can I do to start living that way all of the time, to stop worrying about whether some people are getting more than they deserve and start working toward everyone having what they need and a fair chance to dream bigger if they want?  How do we start making sure we measure ourselves and others according to our human value and not our monetary value?  We need to spend more time with people and not at work.  We need to think about others' dreams as well as our own and realize that we don't lose our own by taking others' into account.  I know I'm idealistic, but I really don't want to live in a world where everyone just accepts that other people may suffer while they spend their resources only on themselves.  I don't want to hear debates about the entitlement of the wealthy not to have to share their wealth, as though they are not connected to others around them, as though the most important issue at hand is the injustice of forced redistribution and not the inequity of the way resources are distributed to begin with.  I know I've talked about my feeling of guilt about my relative good fortune while others struggle, but this is not only about guilt.  It just seems so ugly and unjust, and I just wish that we could look at each other in a way that we see our shared humanity and not only our competition for pieces of the same pie.

Ani D.

One of the most exciting parts of this week has been getting Ani DiFranco's new album, Which Side Are You On?, nearly a month before its official release date in mid-January.  I've heard all of the songs before, either at a live performance or in concert footage on YouTube, but it's been great to hear what she decided to do with them in the recording studio.  And it's just this really beautiful thing - she's found a wonderful lifetime love, with whom she has a young daughter, and her political voice is also more pointed and articulate than ever.  She's got roots in her community in New Orleans, and it shines through both in her lyrics and the other musicians who accompany her on many of the tracks.  It may sound cheesy, but she is really a role model for me.  I'm not going to follow the same path as her - I'm not a folk music prodigy or poet or artist - but her social consciousness and pursuit of joy and balance is inspiring.  She's someone who's always learning and growing.  Listening to the album makes me feel motivated to re-engage with the world around me and appreciative of the love in my life. 

A couple of tastes:

The political: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7BgtY3_Ltc&feature=related

The personal: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iz6snoSNeE4

Want, Need, Should

I find myself thinking a lot lately about what it is that I want to, need to, and should do, and how those three verbs (want, need, should) balance vs. each other.  In any one choice, can I accomplish all three?  I find myself feeling selfish when I do something that I want to do and not something I should do, even if it's not something I'd say I shouldn't do.

That's vague, I know.  But a little more specifically, I think about the relationship I'm in, the things in it that I want, and the other needs that I have.  No relationship can meet all of my needs - there's a lot that's up to me, and a lot that gets filled in by having different relationships - but which things are requisite for me to be happy in a relationship, and which things am I willing to concede?  I've never been happy with any concessions - even as a kid, and even when making trivial decisions (e.g. which item on the fast food menu would I like this time?), I have had a hard time with the things that I know I'm not getting when I choose something else. 

My guy is lovely, and I'm pretty crazy about him - I like the way he sees the world differently from me and doesn't balk at the challenge of being together, to name just a couple of things.  He's a pretty non-ideological and level-headed person, which is a good counter-balance to me with my critical eye - but at the same time, I know he's not likely to share my interest and passion for social justice (and I don't share his love of sports).  Knowing that I myself have a hard time being disciplined in my approach to life, I know that being with someone who isn't going to be inclined to push me means that I will have to motivate myself a lot of the time.  I know he will always be supportive and encourage me to follow my heart and my principles (another thing I love about him - never overly concerned with what other people think), but he may not have the same causes trigger him.  To what extent do I need or want someone similar to myself, and to what extent is the difference good or at least manageable?  I was married to someone with similar principles, and I didn't feel sufficiently challenged and engaged in the relationship.  Now I'm with someone who sees the world quite differently in many ways, even coming from a very different cultural background from myself, and I sometimes face doubts about how we're going to pull off staying together.  For now it works, with blips here and there, but since my wants and needs are shifty things, it takes considerable discernment to decide, with confidence, that this relationship can last, ebbing and flowing as it may need to, but persisting.

Then there's also the tug of superhero aspirations - I want to make a difference in the world, and I know I have a hard time maintaining the will to make the effort, so maybe I should be with someone who will "crack the whip" more and push me to contribute, not let me get complacent.  I don't think "taskmaster" is a quality I'd really like in a partner, but when I think about doing the most good, I wonder if I need someone to help hold me accountable or spur me on by their own example of drivenness.  Then again, I love my guy...and I know he wants what is best for me, so maybe that's all that is needed to have the support I need for my aspirations.  I lean in this direction and hope that it is true...and that it brings happiness, fulfillment, and some good things to the world around me. 

Different

I feel different.  From myself, as I've known myself to be, for most of my life.  It's not that my personality has changed, but I had this moment today when I just realized just how much transformation I've been through in the past couple of years.  It's hard to describe in a way, partly because the connections are still being made in my brain, but I can feel the change in myself.  Two years ago, I was struggling in my marriage and with my job, I didn't feel like I was at all where I wanted to be, and I didn't know how to fix that.  At the beginning of last year, I decided to end my marriage.  I lived alone for the first time, and for the first time I was making some decisions based on what I wanted and not what I thought I should do.  I got to travel the world for work for most of the summer and saw a lot of new and amazing places.  I had times of depression and loneliness and times of peace and joy.  I had no idea how things were going to be when I got past the feelings of guilt and shame about getting divorced.  I fell in long-distance love, which was wonderful and agonizing and another source of uncertainty.  At the beginning of this year, I went to India and danced for a wedding and then went back to India for five months after that to be closer to my new love and learn what living in India would feel like.  I struggled with uncertainty, the feeling of being in limbo for a long time, being out of place.  I had a beautiful apartment materialize and then get washed away (literally) by monsoon rain, and then had nobody to help me rescue my moldy belongings and move elsewhere.  I made a wonderful new friend during the ordeal who was preordained to be my karaoke partner.  I had wonderful moments and times when I wanted to get the next available flight back to Chicago.  My love grew in the midst of my doubts.  My job existed, but it was not the most important thing.  I returned to Chicago and still feel like I'm in transition.

I feel different because I feel like I can see life from more angles now.  I still abhor patriarchy and injustice and small talk like I did for so long.  I still don't like Twilight.  I don't like unrealistic fantasies.  But I also can now see the possibility of being happy, even through the residue of guilt that I still need to deal with.  I can see an imperfect relationship with an imperfect person and think it's perfectly wonderful.  I can see that I simply cannot do everything, that there are some paths that I won't take in favor of taking others, and I am more okay with that than I've ever been - I may never go to grad school, I may never have kids, and either way, I think I'll be okay.  I can see the good fortune I've had through some unexpected twists at my job, when I never thought I'd still be at the same company after more than seven years.  I still have some dark, difficult lows, and I'm definitely lonely, but I also have hope and some experience seeing how things ebb and flow.  I know tomorrow I might read this and not be feeling as optimistic, and it might seem overly sentimental and sugar-coated.  But right now, I know it's true.

Generally speaking

I am guilty of doing it myself, but still I have to say - I can get really frustrated by the way we humans seem to want to generalize about other people or compare ourselves with other people.  A few examples...

- I posted this link on facebook to an NPR story about the media portrayal of the American South.  I know I've used the words "hillbilly" and "redneck" in recent memory myself, as well as imitating a Southern accent (in front of a friend who is from the South...oops), so shame on me!  Truly, it's embarrassing when I'm part of the phenomenon I'm critiquing.

- An acquaintance in Mumbai posted this link showing how one of the best musicians in the US, Joshua Bell, played his violin at a subway station in Washington, D.C. -- and only one person stopped.  My Mumbaikar pal captioned this, "Americans are ignorant?..."  But really, I think the clip says more about humans at large than Americans in particular -- we are so carried forward by our habit energy that we aren't aware of the present moment.  But it caught me that he captioned the picture with a generalization about Americans - first, because as an American I'm going to immediately feel defensive, but also because I know that this guy has more exposure to American media than actual Americans, and from my perspective the jump to a not-so-favorable generalization based on a video of a few hundred people one day in a subway station in D.C. betrays a pre-existing view on Americans.  I do find it disturbing that people didn't stop and recognize the beauty of what the guy was playing - particularly because I could see myself being one of them - but spinning it into a generalization about 300 million + people is a leap.

- Another acquaintance recently posted a picture on facebook that was intended to be humorous: it was a chart with two columns, one for men and one for women, and under men it had things like "Conquers nations", "Frees slaves", "Discovers America", "Fights terrorists", and under women it had only "Gets more likes on facebook".  I am sort of annoyed that this one even bothers me, because I consider it so easily collapsible by any reasonable, fact-based 30-second argument (men didn't do all of that alone, men have historically oppressed women, the things listed under "men" carry with them some cringe-worthy bad effects, there are plenty of notable things for the "women" column, I've not noticed a pattern of more facebook likes for women...)  But it does bother me, because clearly some people think there is enough of a kernel of truth to find it funny in the first place.  Gender generalizations are probably the most irritating of all to me, because I grew up in a place that still has relatively narrow options for women and I know I've internalized some of the implicit and explicit messages of patriarchy.

I don't entirely understand why I chafe so much against generalizations and comparisons.  I think it's likely coming from feeling different in many ways from what is considered normative, as well as from my natural skepticism that the surface view of things is sufficient.  I always want to get to the reality of things, and it frustrates me that we are all so subjective, driven to see things from perspectives based on emotional reactions and conditioned values.  There must be a way to have our views, to feel things deeply, but still to allow room for others to do the same with different views and feelings and not end up arguing with or marginalizing or generalizing each other.

Social struggles

I've had a hard time over the past week since my guy left and I've been on my own.  I've been feeling kind of bad about myself, wondering why I have such a limited social life and don't feel like I have much going for me here.  And then today, in the midst of an other bout of self pity, I realized just how many things have gotten me to here:

1. Divorce.  Yes, it's been over a year since the divorce was finalized, but it's not just the divorce, but having been married for a while that led to me not hanging out with friends that often - evenings and weekends were mainly time spent with my ex and at times also his family in the area.  So my friends from before my marriage adapted to the low-frequency get-togethers, and they also had plenty going on in their own lives to keep them busy (relationships, school, etc.)

2. Travel.  I was in India during January of this year, in addition the 5 months I spent there from May through September.  So I've not really been around much, at least not consistently, so I've had a hard time staying in touch with friends here in Chicago (and admittedly I was not great at making a point to email and Skype from India, either).  Being away so much has also had the effect of keeping me in a perpetual state of adjustment, which makes social life less natural and comfortable than it might otherwise be.  And of course, any hobbies, classes, etc. that I might have signed up for had I been here did not happen.

3. Life changes.  One of my key social activities used to be my weekly small group Bible study, but that ended last year and I only see one friend from that group regularly, though I do see a few others occasionally.  All of us have been through life changes, too - moving, getting married, having kids.  To a large extent, we have grown apart as we've gone down our own paths.

4. Discouragement.  Last year, after I'd separated from my ex and moved into my own apartment, I found a group on Meetup.com that seemed fun and quirky, and I tried going.  The first event was fun, a scavenger hunt at the Art Institute, but the next event was awkward.  It was a trip to an annual holiday craft sale, and only two other people came -- they were regulars with the group, and they seemed to feel a little uncomfortable with a lone newcomer there.  I also signed up for a screen printing class earlier this year, which was cool, but the one person from the class with whom I had an actual conversation, who also lived near me and seemed to have some shared interests, didn't end up coming back again on the same nights that I was there, so that sort of ended before it started. These kinds of thing probably affect me too much - but I really hate going and trying to befriend strangers.  I've never made any friends outside of school and friends of friends, so I find the blind date approach to friendship incredibly uncomfortable to begin with, and when it doesn't go well it feels particularly grim.

It's clear to me that I need new friends, but making them doesn't come very easily to me, and when I'm depressed, it's extra hard to get motivated to start.  I know I'll keep trying, but I'm not really having a great time in the process.

Commitment & Aliens

Should you ever find yourself considering the option of importing someone for the purpose of marrying them, it turns out that the process is a smidge complex: http://www.visajourney.com/content/k1flow.  We're not necessarily starting on this yet, but I was wondering what was involved and...yikes.  "Form I-129F: Petition for Alien Fiance(e)" - enough said.

Sola

Every time I see my guy and then one of us gets jetted thousands of miles away, it's sort of like going through a break-up.  It doesn't bring the same sense of permanent loss, but there is a mourning process, and I have a hard time adjusting back to being alone most of the time.  It involves a lot of snacking and pajamas and not much bathing.  In my current woman-of-the-wilderness state, I find myself with a lot of time to think.  And I've been thinking a lot about relationships and connectedness, because I feel lonely and disconnected.  I try to tell myself that this time alone is good for me, that I can do all kinds of things I like or have been meaning to do: pursue something creative, read, write, listen to music, do yoga, go for morning walks, cook, watch a movie, update my resume, do some travel planning for next year, post some pics from this year's travels on facebook.  But right now, I just don't feel motivated.  I find myself feeling kind of pathetic for wishing I had someone nearby to hang out with instead of hanging out by myself.  My work is mostly solitary, so after work I feel like having dinner or just sitting on my couch with someone else, watching a show and chatting intermittently.  I know I'm ready to end this phase of living alone, but unfortunately I don't see an end in sight anytime soon.

Giving it all away

I've had a ton on my mind lately...what the next step is in a very-long-distance relationship, whether I want to make a geographical move and/or career move in the next year, the nature and strength of my friendships...the list could go on.  At the moment what I'm kicking around is my financial standing and how it interacts with my guilt and sense of responsibility, as well as the decisions I make about everything I mentioned in the previous sentence.

What it comes down to is that I don't know how I should be dealing with my finances.  For years now I've felt strongly that I should be giving a proportion of my income (generally 10%, sometimes a little lower, sometimes more) to charity, to support not only myself but those around me.  When I was married, my husband felt perhaps more strongly about giving, so together we budgeted more than10% of our income to give to charity on a monthly basis.  After letting this slide a bit last year and giving more like 5-10% during the months of high expenses that came with moving out, paying rent and living expenses for two apartments for a few months, and financing a divorce, I went back to giving a stable 10% of my gross income.  Which sounds nice, maybe, but I struggle with it at times.

First, I feel frustrated that being married to a grad student for 4 years cost me nearly half of the income I earned during that time - my savings were set back a lot when I handed over tens of thousands in cash and retirement funds that I have never fully felt was "ours" to divide up.  Surely it can be debated what was the right or fair thing to do, but to some degree I feel taken advantage of, and I don't think it's sheer greed that makes me feel that way.  I think in retrospect, my financial decisions during the divorce were driven largely by the immense guilt of being the only one who wanted to get the divorce to begin with...more on guilt to follow.

Second, this year I've spent thousands on travel, mainly between here and India, mostly on account of being in a relationship with an Indian and wanting to spend extended amounts of time with him and see if we can make things work.  It's something I've wanted to do, but it's taken money that would otherwise have been savings and sunk it into airline tickets.  And I'd love to have the situation resolve and have us be able to live in the same place, but I'm not sure how soon that will happen...so the travel spending will likely continue to be pretty high next year as well.

So with my savings flat, my investments fluctuating, and my projected expenses high, I'm struggling to keep my resolve to keep giving 10% of my income away.  Already I'm a little behind on the past couple of months, and I'm just not totally sure what to do.  On one hand, I feel like I make good money and only have to support myself, so I should do what I can to help others who don't have as good of a situation as I do.  On the other hand, I feel like I could really use the savings so I can possibly buy a home, relocate, take a pay cut to pursue a job opportunity, etc.  So I'm torn.

And back to guilt...I think it has a ton to do with it.  I realized while on a solo walk this morning that I actually feel guilty for having a good income and not struggling, so it fills some sort of psychological need for me to give a lot of it away.  I also feel guilty that I'm not an activist and am not that active in my community, that I work a corporate job that doesn't do something really good for the world but is primarily driven by profit.  I struggle with finding meaning, and giving to causes that uplift people and create opportunities that otherwise wouldn't exist makes me feel better.  But I am not so sure the sense of guilt about my status is a healthy motivator. 

I struggle when I look at my finances, I try to tell myself that rather than cutting my giving I should cut my spending on myself, and probably there is some truth to that...but I don't feel like I live lavishly, and it's been a rough couple of years for savings, so it's really hard for me to stay the course and keep giving at the same level.  But the feeling that I'm selfish and greedy for wanting to keep more for myself is still there.  I know it's not totally fair to feel that way, that I have to grant myself some leniency since it's been a rough couple of years financially, but it is still difficult.  I feel resentment about what the divorce did to my finances, so that also complicates things and also makes me feel badly for not totally letting it go.  There's part of me that feels like by giving, maybe I'm trying to atone for the divorce and reclaim the moral high ground that my ex seemed so solidly to have over me...which is why I find myself resenting my ex: because I think he thought he was better as a person than me somehow and deserving of the money I earned for the years we were together.  But really, it is likely more the nasty little voice at the back of my head than him whispering that to me.  I haven't even seen him in months, and it really doesn't matter what he thinks of me, but still it influences me. 

I guess in the end, I am trying to move forward in my own way, to find a balance between the things I want and need and my desire for meaning and contributing positively to the world, and I've lost both a lot of money and the person who held me accountable for the latter goal.  If I live differently from how we lived together, does it mean that I've changed for the worse and become a more self-centered person?  Rationally, I may say no, it does not, but it's a tough sell to my conscience.

Companion Energy

I feel kind of ridiculous saying it, but I really don't like living alone.  I can name a lot of up sides to it, mainly having to do with freedom and flexibility, but ultimately, I love having a companion.  Even if we're not doing something together, I like just being in the presence of others, their living filling even silence with energy.  In Mumbai, there was so much human energy everywhere just because there are so many people.  A lot of the time, it was too much -- too many people, all trying to do their own things and getting in each other's way.  I love that city at night because it calms down, but there is still a lot of life happening.  In Chicago, there are a good number of people out during the day, enough to give me that buzz of life being lived.  But at night, most people retreat to their homes, and since I live alone, sometimes it's just too still.  I intentionally got an apartment on a busy road so that I can hear cars and people outside later in the evening and earlier in the morning, which helps stem the feeling of isolation, but I'd really love to be hanging out in here with someone else, listening to traffic, watching football, cooking dinner.  I want to be surrounded by not only my possessions and interests, but those of someone else. 

But then, on the other hand...

My last blog post put a positive spin on the struggles of being in an ultra-long distance relationship.  Today I am not feeling so optimistic.  I'm wondering what on earth I'm doing, doubting my ability to endure a long separation when what we most need is time to get closer across our differences in cultures and personalities.  I want to get on with it, to progress and grow together, not put things on idle and get on with it a year or two down the road.  What even happens between now and then?  It feels like I have to make some hard, rational decisions about things that are close to my heart, and it sucks. 

A colleague of mine, also a nerdy researcher, told me to think of it like a conjoint exercise - basically decide how much each option matters to me (location, career, relationship) and then make a decision by picking the feasible combination with the highest value.  Not so sure that one is going to help me, but I have been realizing how highly I value this relationship.  Truly, I think that though I want a meaningful career in which I'm contributing to something I care about, I don't want it to be something that takes so much of my time that it's a struggle to find time for relationships and trying out new things as well.  I want a job that I'm good at that is important to me, but I don't want it to be all-consuming.  My company used to offer the option to buy an extra week of vacation, and I always said I'd buy as many weeks as they would let me -- my non-work time is extremely important to me, more so than a certain amount of extra cash flow.  So I want to prioritize this relationship, but I'm not sure if it's even possible.  I tried living in Mumbai, and while there are things that I will always be fond of about that city, it is a trying place in which to live everyday life.  A lot of it is the horrible balance of work vs. the rest of life that took over while I was there -- so even when I'm there, near to my guy, the time for relaxing or doing things together was limited.  So now I'm back in a less stressful place, with more personal time, and I'm alone.  It's incredibly frustrating.

Maybe there is some solution that I haven't thought of yet, some way to speed up the process of getting to the same place or some location that would be good for both of us personally.  I don't know...and I'm not sure how long I can wait to know.

Love and Learning

I'm a pretty restless person, or at least I've been in a restless state for long enough that it feels like a personality trait.  Partly it's that I've never reached a point when I've known exactly what I want and the action to take to make it happen -- I don't think most people have such moments of clarity, but the sense of "no, this isn't it", keeps me in motion.  I fear committing to anything that will limit my ability to alter my course if I change my mind - I think this is why most of the time the idea of having kids elicits a strong emotional "no!" from me.  And there's also a more positive force at play in my restlessness: my love of learning.  I want to keep learning, and with every new environment or situation I put myself in, my brain makes more connections, even if it gives me a fresh batch of gray hairs for the stress and effort involved. 

This is all a sort of long introduction to the specific thing on my mind tonight, which is what makes me stay in a relationship that is ultra-long distance and is bound to be that way for some time to come with no certain end in sight.  There is a way to spin it as totally romantic, and it really is, but I also hate it.  Talking at beginnings/endings of days, struggling at times to hear over traffic and unclear connections, staying in touch well enough to remain a meaningful part of each other's lives, even though we can't spend time together during our day-to-day lives.  So what keeps me going?  Love, obviously, but that's not all.  I feel like because I'm away from him so much of the time, I am learning to appreciate what's missing when there isn't everyday life to share - if we were together, I would more likely wonder if we were growing habitual and stale.  As things are now, I kind of wish I had that problem: too much time together! 

I also think that I've been forced to face the tendency I have to try to control in a relationship for fear of losing the other person.  It's a death grip-inducing fear I have based on the knowledge that good things can slip away - so I have a hard time knowing what the reasonable balance is between time with a significant other and time with friends, hobbies, and work.  Clearly every couple needs quality time together, but I tend to want a lot of it if given the option -- so it's not all bad for us to be getting some forced time apart so that we establish that we are in a relationship, but we still have individual lives to lead.  And then we can bring that individuality back and share it with each other when we talk, which I really enjoy.  Maybe that sounds oh-so obvious, but how people manage to stay together without holding onto each other with all their might is still something that is a mystery to me.  How do we let it ebb and flow and still feel confident that the outcome will be a healthy and happy relationship?  It almost induces panic in me, but it reassures me that I can feel the love and devotion coming my way, calmly and with intensity, even through the phone.  I'm fortunate that my guy is far more relaxed and patient than I am, both because it gives me the reassurance I want and because it means he's going to help make sure we're making decisions for the right reasons and not in haste.  This is where the love of learning comes in -- I think it's valuable for me to learn to be on my own, balance life as an individual with a long-term relationship, and have the patience to live through the experience of getting to the place we want to be together, wherever that ends up being.  I have to find joy in the process, not only the outcome.

I'm not sure that's totally thought through or well articulated, but that's all I've got in me for tonight...

The Uphill

I've really not felt like blogging much lately.  Partly it's that it feels like it requires so much explanation of my current context, which is almost impossible to explain, and partly it's that so much of it is emotional and hard for me to articulate.  I'm feeling relieved to be leaving Mumbai, which has not been an easy place for me to live, but sad to be leaving my few friends and guy here behind, and also disappointed that I don't feel like I have been able to adapt as effectively as I'd hoped over five months.  I'm also anxious about what it will feel like to be back in the US, in a place very familiar to me, after being away for a while in a place so distant physically and culturally.  I'm sure I'm going to answer with "haan" instead of "yeah" at times.  And going back to my old neighborhood and living alone again...I think it's going to be nice, but sometimes disorienting and scary and depressing.  My friends and family will be happy to see me, and I'll be excited to see them, but there's going to be part of me that isn't all there.  And of course there's the ache of going from seeing my guy every day to talking on the phone at odd times when we're both awake and available, and not knowing when we'll get to live in the same place again.  I think that's the one I'm most dreading at this point, though the loneliness of readjusting to Chicago and living on my own again also won't be fun.

I know I'm supposed to focus on the positive, but I don't think it will help to deny how difficult the next few weeks will be.  That said, I'll make the effort: The best piece of news I've gotten lately, which makes moving a lot better, is that my guy is going to get to visit the US in November and stay for both my 30th birthday and Thanksgiving.  I'm really excited that he'll finally get to see where I'm from and meet my family and friends.  Not the same as having him actually get to come and live in the US, but maybe it's a start down that path...

Melancholy

I'm feeling disappointed in myself because I feel myself slipping into melancholy again as I get closer to returning to the US.  I feel out of control, and the anxiety is driving me to distraction and at least some tears every day.  Sometimes I think I'm okay, that I'll make it through the day just fine, and then toward the end I just feel sad, or panicked, or both.  And not only that, but the insecurity is making me cling to my guy with uncomfortable intensity, and unsurprisingly it's making him want more time away from me, which makes me feel even more insecure...and it's a vicious cycle.

I know it's understandable to feel anxious and insecure right now, but what is it in my psyche that makes me suddenly start thinking that maybe it's all going to fall apart, that my depression and erratic moods are going to drive my guy away for good?  I feel so awful and painful to be around that I can't imagine why he spends so much time with me.  It sounds pathetic when I write it out, because I know that I'm not always, only this way all of the time, and I know there are things about me that make me likable and someone he wants to be with.  But at times when I don't have a lot to offer, when I need more than I can give, I feel guilty that he has to deal with me, and I lose sight of the fact that I'm not always a source of negative energy.

The other problem is my lack of close friends here who could also support me -- I have one other friend here who is close enough to confide in and talk about how I feel, and fortunately I get to spend time with her tonight.  But mostly I feel alone -- some of it is because I do tend to isolate myself when I'm feeling especially low, I don't like being seen this way and I don't want to go out and pretend everything is normal. 

I'm distracted and have a hard time focusing, even on important things like work, and I feel like I've become flakier, which makes me feel worse still.  I wonder why other people seem to function fine even with adversity, while I'm here feeling incapable of the standard day-to-day activities of life.

Back and Forth

I think the best advice I've gotten lately has been that I'm just going to have to get back to Chicago and see how things go before I decide what I really want to do next.  I know what it's like to live here in Mumbai now, but I don't know what it's like to leave my love here and go back to live in Chicago.  I'm going back with half a mind to turn and come back here again soon, because I'm truly not decided.  There's part of me that is craving Chicago again, but if this guy is really the person I want to be with (and I think he is), it feels foolish to just leave if I have the chance to be with him.  On one hand, I have to be in a place where I want to be, living in a way that is sustainable -- so clearly if I come back, something has to change in the way I'm living so I'm not wearing myself down.  Staying here sounds exhausting, but so does being so far from him...neither is really sustainable, and I don't know that I can just get used to either scenario.  So I may fly back and try to look like I'm living a normal life in Chicago, but it's going to be a while before I'm truly decided on where I'm going to be for more than three months at a time.

Craving

Someone asked me what food I was most looking forward to having again when I get back to the US, and I couldn't even narrow it to a top 10. So I figure food is as good a place as any to start in looking on the bright side of getting back to Chicago.  Here's what I plan to eat, but not necessarily in this order (and in some cases it will take multiple trips to the same place):

1) Indie Cafe - panang curry, sweet potato tempura maki

2) Kopi Cafe - egg sandwich supreme (hard boiled egg, horseradish, tomato, greens, on mini baguette), baked nachos, blueberry white tea, chocolate malt

3) Hopleaf - any beer, blueberry mead, CB&J (grilled cashew butter, fig jam, and morbiere cheese) sandwich

4) Icosium Kafe - Carthage crepe (feta, roasted veggies, walnuts), mint tea with honey

5) Tweet - veg biscuits & gravy

6) Coffee Studio - cappuccino, mini goat cheese quiche

7) In Fine Spirits - some kind of awesome gin cocktail

8) Apart Pizza - vegetarian (4 quarters, one of which is corn)

9) M. Henry - breakfast bread pudding

10) Hannah's Bretzel - any sandwich on bretzel, white cheddar & watercress sandwich

11) Bleeding Heart Bakery - veruca salt (salted caramel) cupcake

I'm also looking forward to fall baking, pumpkins, apple cider, and other festive foods (birthdays, Thanksgiving, etc.)  Mmm...

Limbo

It's been three months since I last wrote here, and I'm not sure what I'm even going to write about.  I've got about four weeks left in India for now, and I'm finding myself really moody.  I have a lot of anxiety about coming back, and though I've missed being in the US and seeing my friends and family there, I'm also leaving a lot here.   Before I came here, I felt torn between two places, in a sort of limbo, and while I've been here my living situation has felt impermanent, and I feel like I'm going back to another temporary arrangement.  I feel ready to proceed on with life with all of the elements in one place -- I'm tired of having a long-term relationship that's here, and a job that can sort of straddle two places, but home and friends and family elsewhere.  I don't expect home to feel like home anymore with such a conspicuous absence of the person I want to spend the most time with.  I am having a hard time deciding what to do when I get back to Chicago.  Finding an apartment and moving in and trying to get settled seems like a good idea, but I have plans to travel for some extended periods and getting a place that I'll be in enough to consider it home seems unlikely.  I know feeling at home in Mumbai is not something I could ever count on and in fact the place taxes my energy, but feeling at home even in a familiar place when I've got my life split across such distance is also not likely to happen.  Maybe it's ungrateful of me, because I know I have a lot to be thankful for, but I'm feeling down and anxious about what comes next and how it's all going to work out in the end.

Rain, Vocabulary, and Astrology

It rained last night, and everyone here has been so happy about it today.  It's kind of amazing, witnessing the joy and relief on people's faces as the hot, muggy Mumbai summer ends and the monsoon arrives.  It will bring cooler air and a sense of freshness, but I suspect that in a few weeks everyone will be grumbling (or as they would say, "cribbing") about the buckets and buckets of rain we're getting.  I packed my umbrella in my work backpack today, so that I'm prepared in case of any downpours -- last night I was not so prepared, and the cabs were all full when I was trying to catch one to go home from the office.  I ended up with one of the more rickety cabs, which had pulled over so the driver could try to figure out why his windshield wiper wasn't working.  He didn't figure it out, but he took me anyway, reaching his arm out the window to swipe the blade across the windshield occasionally.  I felt badly for the guy.  When I got home, it was nice to open the windows and feel cooler air coming in for once!

More words and vocabulary...I get called "madam" here a lot, by people trying to sell me stuff, cab drivers, and restaurant staff.  An elevator is a "lift", and the one in the building where I am living (or "staying", as Indians would say) is operated by a person (the housing society I live in employs people to open doors and push buttons, which I find awkward, especially considering how tiny the lift is).  Lifts here generally have a sort of criss-cross grated metal gate that is manually pulled open and closed, as well as a corresponding gate at each floor, so you get in, close both gates, push the floor button, then open both gates, step off, and close them again when you get where you're going. 

I was talking to a couple of women in the office here (whom I always want to call girls, I feel like unmarried women are so innocent seeming here compared to in the US!) about arranged marriage and horoscopes the other day.  And they told me that here, it's not the sun sign but rather the moon sign that gets more attention, and traditional Hindu families really will consult their children's natal charts and compare them to prospective matches to see if there is anything inauspicious.  They also choose wedding dates based on auspicious times in the Hindu calendar.  Being American, I find it hard to imagine having my future so mapped out for me by the stars or my family or karma (which is really the wiggle room in the predictions made by astrology).  But I can't help thinking there probably is some sort of truth to us being the product of our position in the world, where and when we were born and how that sends us off into the world.  As they say, there's always karma to change what's fated, so it seems more likely to have some truth to it with that acknowledgement of imprecision/complexity.  After talking with them, I went to http://astro.cafeastrology.com/ and got my natal chart -- you have to know the time of your birth as well as the date in order to ascertain your moon sign, but fortunately I know my birth time because my mom is detailed with things like that.  It turns out that my sun sign (Scorpio) is the opposite of my moon sign (Taurus), which means I was born during a full moon, when the sun and moon were in opposite directions from the earth.  The sun sign is supposed to be about your personality, while the moon sign is more about your emotional life.  So with opposite signs, I am supposed to have some confusion: "People born when the sun opposes the moon have an internal struggle between their needs and their wants" (http://www.cafeastrology.com/natal/sunoppositionmoon.html).  This rings true for me, but on the positive side, it says full mooners are supposed to be able to see things from different perspectives, which can bring balance rather than extremism.  This can come in the form of self awareness but also indecision.  Very interesting.  I recommend checking out your natal chart if you can get ahold of your birth time...fascinating stuff, or at least I think so!

Moodiness and More Minutiae

I keep thinking of more things to write about Mumbai and then I forget before I get to my blog.  I've also been having a rough time lately just being here and feeling both the desire to take refuge in my air conditioned bedroom and some pretty severe loneliness.  I want to be out, absorbing everything around me and feeling adventurous, but when I'm out I'm just hot and at least a little confused and it saps my will pretty quickly.  I am missing springtime, Chicago, my friends.  And because I am so often trying to make sense of where I am in a broader sense (career, travel, love, family), I end up with some seriously funky moods.  Ironically, though I've just transplanted myself on the other side of the world by my own choice, I feel stuck.  I don't know how to get it all aligned.  For instance, career and love are in two very different places right now, and I feel like I can really only deal with one while the other suffers.  I'm not sure how to fix that, if sticking it out will be worth it and it will all come together in the end, or if I'll have to make a tough choice at some point.

On a lighter note, there's always more minutiae to note to flesh out the context I'm in more:

One general area is vocabulary -- even though people here speak English, word choice is often different.  Some examples:  intersection --> junction, green pepper --> capsicum, line --> queue, sandal --> chappal, moving to a new house --> shifting...and there are lots more that I don't remember right now.

Corn is a common pizza topping here, which I actually like -- but I find it odd that this is called "American", since to my knowledge corn is a topping here and in Europe but not in the US -- except at the European style pizza place I used to order from.

It costs me the same to take a cab to work as it costs to take the train in Chicago.  If I took a bus it would cost amazingly little.

I wrote before about there being people employed to do things that make me feel helpless.  I sense that people here prefer to have a person help them, rather than to do things themselves -- and that it's a sense of status.

I don't have a washing machine, and my maid washes my clothes 3 times a week by hand in a bucket, which is totally normal.  I find this fascinating and awesome and a little guilt-inducing all at once.  I actually hand washed my own stuff once, and it was kind of a nice feeling, learning to do something a machine has long ago taught me that I don't need to know.  It's another life skill, one I won't need much probably, but still kind of nice to have.

People don't tip here.  Cab drivers don't get tips generally, and restaurant servers get 10%.  This is one thing I actually like about the US -- I think service is better when there's some incentive to get a good tip, and I think people being served are more appreciative of the service they receive because they can express it through a variable tip level.  I had a realization the other day that people here seem so much less polite and courteous of other people, likely because there are so many other people around, and so many of them are paid to do something specific, and it stops being a big deal after a while. 

Guy movies

There is a genre of movie that I really hate that I classify simply as "guy movies".  I generally avoid these movies, because the common themes are guys being wildly irresponsible, drinking, doing drugs, getting involved in violence, and sleeping with some hot, no-personality women.  I hate sounding like a prude, but it actually just depresses me to think of the degree of selfishness and recklessness being basically celebrated as an ideal for manhood.  All of this comes up now because I just saw The Hangover 2 today, and I hated it (and I sort of expected to going in, but I thought I'd try it anyway).  The movie wasn't really all that clever, but it had everything I don't like about guy movies -- and the worst of it for me is the way most of the women (or in many cases, transgendered women) involved were strippers & prostitutes, and it was somehow cool and exciting for the main characters to get involved with them (even though one was married and another on the eve of his wedding).  I guess there's just this part of me that revolts against all of the debauchery, because I don't think it's how people are supposed to treat each other.  No regard for other people's humanity or background or experience, no thinking about the causes or effects, just indulgence.  It grosses me out, makes me feel worse about the world we live in because it's kind of celebrating the things that I wish could cease to exist.

Stop Helping Me

This place seems designed to prevent self sufficiency. To get an apartment, you have to have a broker instead of searching ads online yourself. To get a notebook in the office, I was told to ask the office admin (in Chicago there is a supply room where I can go grab what I need). People don’t clean their own apartments, they have a maid. Those with a little more money don’t drive their own cars, they hire drivers. If you plan a vacation, you don’t just go research the place online and book it, you talk to everyone you know who’s been there or is from there (and there will often be many), and they will offer you access to a travel agent they know or a place to stay with a friend or family member. People don’t raise their kids in a nuclear family, they often live with parents who help and have maids who also help with childcare. I went to the grocery store across the street from my apartment, and the shopkeeper told me to give him a call and he’ll deliver so I don’t have to come. Another time, I was painting my toenails and my friend told me I didn’t have to do that myself, I could go and pay and have someone else do it for cheap – but I opted to paint my own toenails. I feel like I must seem anti-social or controlling or even ungrateful, because I want to do things myself, or at least be able to. It feels like micro-delegation here at times, to a point that I can proceed only so far before I have to ask someone for help. Sometimes I want people to not notice me, not offer to help, to leave me alone and not be nice or helpful. I guess I want them to be Chicagoans – I can ask them for help if there’s something I truly can’t do myself, but otherwise I’m left to my own devices.

A couple of more minute things:

Oreos are labeled as a Cadbury product here, instead of Nabisco like they are in the US. Kraft owns both, and Cadbury is huge here, so it just makes more sense that way.

I miss my coffee shop. I wish there were one here that was half as good. On the bright side beverage-wise, fresh lime soda is really refreshing, and mango milkshakes are also delicious (it’s mango season).

Groceries, etc.

I'm in my new place now, and I'm starting to feel a little more comfortable here -- it always takes a few days to get the hang of the layout and switches and knobs in a new place, and this is only day 2.  Last night I was feeling a little pathetic and sorry for myself because I wished I could be somewhere familiar (i.e. Chicago), somewhere I could just go out and walk around and not feel sort of lost and out of place.  It doesn't help that I feel the curious eyes of everyone on me, some of which comes from the reality that a lot of people really do stare at me, and some of which stems from my being extra self conscious since a lot of the time I don't know exactly what I'm doing and don't really want an audience for my cluelessness.

For example, I went to get groceries last night, which I was a little anxious about even though it's really not hard.  I got the address of the store, glanced at the Google map of my area to see the route, and set off...

Walking in Mumbai is always a little nerve-wracking for me, because there is rarely sidewalk (there are stretches, but they are inconsistent and sometimes not worth the trouble to use) and you're generally sticking to the sliver of road between the parked cars and the cabs, cars, motorcyles, bikes, buses, guys pushing/pulling carts of stuff, and other people on foot who are out and about.  There's always a lot of honking happening, and you generally cross the road whenever there's a reasonable clearing in the traffic (or the next car coming can slow down or swerve around you a bit).  My neighborhood isn't too hectic relatively speaking, thankfully, but it still doesn't make for a serene stroll.

Also, directions and addresses are difficult for me here.  I've been spoiled with a very nice grid system in Chicago, complete with numeric coordinates and almost all perpendicular streets.  Nothing is perpendicular here, and addresses are relational (near such and such landmark).  And for some reason, whatever the landmark is supposed to be never stands out the way I think it should.  For instance, I've had people point out a train station before, and I never would have seen it because it doesn't look like a train station in the US with a big, fat obvious entrance that is clearly labeled and trains and tracks that you can see as you approach.  And right now, I'm living in a place where the nearest landmark is the Colaba Post Office, and I don't actually know which building around me is the post office.  I haven't really looked, admittedly, but it seems like it should be glaringly obvious.  I have a sort of contextual blindness here that I think is getting a little better, but it's still there.

So that brings me back to my grocery excursion to the world foods market last night (which carries exotic things like peanut butter).  I set out on a route that was semi-familiar because I'd walked in the same general direction before, but at one point I kept looking for a left turn that didn't materialize.  I knew at some point I'd have to hit a left, and I eventually did, and it took me in a slightly roundabout way to the place I was looking for: the World Trade Center.  The grocery store address online said there was a shopping area at the bottom, through gate 4, where the grocery store would be.  When I got to gate 4, it had a metal detector and a security guard and didn't look like a grocery store at all, but like some kind of official entrance to an important building -- but I thought, okay, this is how things are so often here, I'm just going to walk through this metal detector and see if there's a grocery store somewhere on the other side.  And there was, in, around the corner and to the left - which felt like a triumph because if it had been my first time in Mumbai, there's no way I would have assumed that there would be a grocery store in such a strange place with no sign whatsoever out at the street.  That's how I feel about everything here -- it's not at all obvious, and so the first time doing anything is always the hardest by far.  Maybe because of my feeling of success, I decided to try a different route home that I'd spotted on the Google map...but that didn't work out so well and I had to retrace my steps a little bit to get back.  In the end, I got food, though I was disappointed because I forgot the ice cream bar I'd been planning to reward myself with.  It's the little things. :-P

A few other random things just to flesh out my experience here a little bit more...

Today I felt sweat drip down my inner thigh to my calf.  It's HOT.  But it's amazing how much good ceiling fans do -- we definitely overuse AC in the US.

I have a maid, which is totally normal here, and it's absurd how little I have to pay her.  The amount she gets per month for an hour a day every day would get me a maid for an hour, once, in Chicago.  It makes me feel confused...I know this is how the economy here works, but it still feels wrong.

Speaking of employment, it's amazing how it works here.  In stores, I always feel like there are 3-5 times the number of people it actually takes to get a task accomplished -- which I won't argue against since there are a lot of people here to employ, but I also think it's funny.  At the grocery store, there are two guys in a small produce section who just weigh and label stuff for checkout as you pick it out.  I was offered help finding stuff by at least 2 guys (and the store is fairly small, I think it has 4 short aisles or something).  A guy rings everything up and checks to make sure the price of each item shows up correctly in the computer, another couple of guys bag it, and another guy stands by the door, checks your receipt as you leave, and then opens the door for you.  I once stopped at duty free at the airport here and had four or five people help me purchase two bottles of whiskey.  And on construction sites here, there always seem to be a bunch of guys just hanging around, and this is only compounded by the lack of safety gear worn by these guys (something that makes me feel a little worried for them).

I despise crows.  They are big, ugly, and loud.  Replace all the songbirds in the trees near you with these giant cawing things and that's what happens outside my bathroom and kitchen windows.  At least the trees are pretty and have bright orangey-red flowers.

I guess that's all for now...til I think of more minutiae to share!

Home

The past few days have been pretty rough for me, because I don't currently have a space of my own.  For the last two weeks and for the next one to come, I'm staying with people while I wait for the day when I can be in my own place.  I didn't expect to feel this way, especially so quickly.  It's made me a little crazy (okay, more than a little), because sometimes I just want the feeling of being at home and relaxing, but there is no such place right now.  I don't have a kitchen filled with food I picked out, I don't have a closet to hang my clothes, I don't have my own bed and bedside table to keep the book I'm reading.  It's hot, so afternoon exploratory walks aren't super appealing right now.  I am dependent on other people to help me get by in even the most basic ways, and I don't enjoy it.  I really can't wait to get to my own apartment and be able to be cluttered and laze around and read and look out at the sea, or go to a store and get some food to cook, or work from home, or walk to a random museum and check it out and then come home.  The morning walk may get revived if it's not too hot or rainy.  One more week...

Amazing things

In less than two weeks, I will live in an apartment with a sea view.  Amazing.  You can Google "Colaba Post Office, Mumbai" and it will give you an approximate location.  And for the record, I'm not living at the post office, just near the post office -- landmarks are key to addresses here.  If you tried to get in a cab and tell them an address, they'd likely have no idea what you were talking about.  You have to know the name of the neighborhood, major roads, key landmarks, and you'll get there.

Also, I am addicted to Kerala style food.  I have gone from feeling a little weird about ordering fish and having it look like a fish (how American am I anyway?), to picking the fish up by the tail and flipping it over and rip off more of its delicious flesh with my bare hand.  Also amazing.

Final point of amazement for the evening: It is 10:21 pm, and I am neither asleep nor drowsy.  I am on a Mumbai schedule now, which means I haven't gone to bed before midnight in a while, and I need an alarm to wake me up for work in the morning.  I went to an 11:20 movie the other night (sadly, we arrived late, so I missed the national anthem at the beginning, but I witnessed the intermission -- they literally cut in the middle of the reel and bring up the house lights so people will go get snacks, playing ads & previews meanwhile), and went to bed at 2 am, only to be awoken by my phone ringing close to 10 am.  This is quite a departure from my Chicago schedule, which is a 9 hour sleep pattern that starts sometime during the 9 pm hour and ends in the 6 am hour without the use of an alarm.  I feel healthy and happy, though; it's just odd to look at the clock sometimes.

So far so good

Week one in Mumbai has flown by, but I think I'm now settled into a local sleep schedule (I'm going to be trying to be a night owl instead of a early bird for the next few months...eating dinner at 9 pm or even later already feels normal).

I've looked at some apartments, which is an interesting process here.  In Chicago, I'd just go on Craigslist and find a few places that look good, call or email the landlord, and arrange to see them.  Easy and very do-it-yourself.  Here, everything is done through brokers, which on the upside means you have someone showing you a bunch of places with your specifications; but on the downside it means a lot of salesmanship, pressuring, and an extra month's rent to pay to the broker for their help.  At one point this week while looking, there was a place I really liked, so we went to talk to the landlord -- and "we" means three brokers, my friend Reema, and me.  And I did very little talking -- it was mainly the brokers and the landlord discussing the financials (rent, deposit, length of stay), Reema speaking up when need be, and me sitting there fascinated that renting a place for 4-5 months could be so complicated.  In the end, I didn't get the place because the landlord didn't want a short term tenant.  But fortunately, I have since found a great place for exactly the right length of time, so in the next couple of days I'll hopefully have the details sorted out and be able to move in a couple of weeks.

Aside from the adjustment and logistics of apartment shopping, now that I'm emerging from the jet lag stupor, I'm really happy to be here.  I'm very, very happy right now, and some of you who read this know exactly why. I'm looking forward to more of that, picking up more Hindi (maybe I'll blog with some of my phrases when I have a respectable amount), being more self sufficient, and getting settled into a little bit of a routine.  More to come soon...

Wistful thinking

It's the end of my last weekend in Chicago for a while, and since I don't know if I'll live here again and I've been saying some goodbyes, I am feeling wistful.  This place has been my home for 7 years, and maybe it will be again, but I know that even if I come back, this is a new phase of life for me.  I think life is set up to be full of beginnings and endings, it's perpetual motion, with so many things coinciding and overlapping.  It's really exciting, but it's hard to adapt and evolve at the pace that decisions are made and circumstances change.  Even when I'm the one making the decisions and changing the circumstances, which is what I'm in the process of doing now.  It's amazing, these feelings both that I'm the least certain of the outcome of what comes next, and simultaneously the most sure of myself that I have ever been.  I feel empowered even while I feel as though I'm not really in control.

I've been thinking a little about my orientation toward life, how I have this persistent sense that there's more to learn and do, and it motivates me to keep going.  Back when I had first started making some of the big decisions I'm now carrying through, someone asked me, "Is there a chance that this won't work out?"  And it's always felt like a very silly question to me, because the answer is, "Of course!"  I think it's really the only honest answer to that question, in any context.  To only pursue "sure bets" means we miss both that nothing is truly a sure bet and that so many of the most important and rewarding things to pursue involve risk and investment of ourselves.  What I'm doing now feels like going "all in", a strategy I was never taught and have in fact been discouraged from.  But my "sure bets", my very rational and responsible-seeming choices up to now, have gone bust when it comes to bringing me happiness.  And I'm actually excited to be going a different route now, one in which my heart and intuition have more influence.  It feels very romantic and much more genuine.

And speaking of being genuine, to start a new tangent, I have also been feeling like I have put myself through too much emotional hell just for wanting to really be and express myself.  It turned out that what I wanted was not to be in my marriage, which I began realizing more than a year and a half ago.  And that really jolting realization was then scrutinized, first by myself, but also by others, including my now ex-husband.  It became a debate of what was true, but the truth that was my emotional reality and not somebody else's, so I find myself getting this surprising new feeling of indignation about how I treated myself and how I was treated by others in the course of trying to navigate how I was feeling (though some very graceful people in my life were much more generous with me).  It was a terrible process for me, but the burden of blame was readily given to me (largely by me) and I accepted it, so it was difficult even to acknowledge my own needs at the time.  It's hard not to break my principle of "no regrets" when it comes to the way things went last year, because I really would do some things differently if I knew then what I know now.  But I know life is what it is and there will always be imperfection, some gap between the way things are and the way we would have liked, because we can't understand and anticipate everything we will encounter.

But we can learn, and that is what I find exhilarating and rewarding about life.  I feel anxious about what comes next, but I feel better about it because I am facing it with someone who doesn't balk at uncertainty.  I don't want to gush, but I'm feeling grateful for all of the really unmatched strengths of this guy right now.

And I guess that's as good a place as any to call it a night.

Zen week is over

So last week I was feeling a sense of possibility, excitement, and everything coming together for my impending move.  Very calm, very zen.  This week, I have felt really anxious.  I feel like I have a lot left to do, and at the same time that I'm trying to focus on the practical things like work and packing and making sure my pre-departure to-do list gets done.  The practical things have never been that hard, they are sort of a welcome break from the emotions of leaving Chicago, being farther away from most people I know, and not really knowing how this whole adventure will go or what will come next.  I don't really spend time consciously worrying, but I've been feeling overwhelmed, and people around me can attest that my emotional fuse has been shorter.  I'm fortunate to have some very supportive people in my life, and even just reminding me that what I'm doing is exciting and that I am capable of doing it is a help.  I think at this point, the encouragement makes the most difference, because soon I will be getting onto a plane alone.  I have some help on the other side, too, but so much of it will be up to me to figure out and to make the most of it.

That doesn't seem like a complete train of thought, but that's all I've got tonight.

Sunday evening and what's next

I'm sitting at home on a Sunday evening at 7:30ish, and I'm loving that the daylight is just now fading.  I feel calm and content after a great weekend road trip with my friend Gloria to my sister's place four hours' drive away.  I will be in Mumbai in three weeks, and I'm trying to savor the time with people here, the relative quiet, and the familiar surroundings.  After 7 years living in Chicago, leaving for Mumbai and whatever comes next after that is going to be bittersweet.  I'll be turning myself upside down in plenty of ways, but the one that's been on my mind is how I'll be missing the people I can currently see and seeing the people I currently miss.  All of my relationships will change, and it's hard to imagine how it will feel.

Gloria asked me during the drive back home whether there was any year in my life that I see as my best.  And I said, I think it's now.  Maybe that's because it's now, but when 2011 arrived I thought it would be my best year yet, and so far, so good.  I think I'd be hard pressed to pick out any year in the past that I felt was so full of opportunities and lessons and growth and new kinds of happiness, as this year has been so far and promises to continue to be.  I am anxious about the vast unknowns, but they are also what give me a sense of the possibilities ahead.  Things could all blow up, but then I'd adapt and try something else -- I think that's really the only way for me to live.

Just a quick one

I feel sort of lame and cowardly for posting this here, but I just didn't have the interest or energy for a facebook based soundbyte debate.  Today I posted a link to a story about income disparity in India (50 billionaires account for 20% of the country's GDP), and I got a mix of responses -- a few outraged by the fact itself, a few taking issue with my posting it.  So I'm not sure how I feel about it...I mean, I got some strong responses, so people are engaged and that's generally a good thing in my book, but I feel like they were responding to what they thought was my position on it, not my actual position (which I didn't actually share, other than to simply say "Wow").  It's got me thinking about how divisive the things that we care about can be.  I don't really expect facebook to be a good forum for dialogue, and maybe it's not really fair to post something without any personal context or opinion, but it was surprising to see how quickly the outrage on both sides of an issue can come out in a way that feels derisive of the "other side".  To me, the problem is one we are all more likely to agree on -- poverty and human suffering -- but who to blame and how to go about changing it are not things we have consensus on.  I do think there are some individuals to blame (and more than just 50 billionaires in India), but I think that more than blame, compassion is needed.  It seems so many problems are exacerbated by lack of communication, which is exacerbated by lack of knowledge of how to communicate and really connect and understand each other.  One facebook post is a small example, and probably not entirely illustrative of the thing I'm feeling at the moment, but because real attempts at understanding each other have been on my mind lately, it sent my brain in this direction.

And now, I will sleep.

You know what's funny?

The past few days I've been all calm and zen, and today I am sick and exhausted and totally annoyed by everything.  I took the afternoon off and slept for three hours, and woke up not so sure I feel better.  I think it's going to be a bit of a crazy month!

Expansion and expression

It's been a good weekend, but I'm feeling exhausted both physically and emotionally.  Some of it's a shortage of sleep and the fatigue after a long evening of revelry yesterday after my friend Kris's wedding.  And some of it's the emotional work of reflection and connection-making that's been occupying me so much lately.  I'm not really eager to start a work week with such thin resources and a persistent need for rest, but my spirit is feeling hopeful.  Because I feel like I'm evolving, like I've become more expansive and less limited inside, and I'm excited by the new possibilities I'm sensing as I experience a new range of emotion and expression.  I was describing to my friend Kelly today at breakfast that I have been finding myself talking to people lately, and while I'm talking, I'm feeling sort of amazed that what I'm saying is articulating so well what I'm feeling.  It's like I'm hearing myself and thinking, "yeah, that's it!"  For a long time I feel I've been drawn to other people who articulate emotion and experience really well, especially to Ani DiFranco, whose music is really emotionally eloquent, both lyrically and in what's conveyed through her guitar playing.  There's been a longing inside me to be able to express things so well, and I'm in the process of learning to listen and hear myself, as well as listen and understand others better.  It's something that excites me, makes me feel somehow stronger and more capable of facing whatever unknown challenges lie ahead.  And it makes me feel more confident in my relationships, because there's more fluidity of what's flowing in and out of me.

Vague emotional reflections

So, so much has been going on with me emotionally over the past week or two, and it's hard to know how to begin blogging about it.  Especially since it's a lot of deep and long-standing personal stuff that has roots in a family dynamic I haven't lived inside of in more than a decade.  So it's complicated and hard for me to articulate, but here I'll give a shot at beginning to...

The way I'm feeling right now is something like freer, lighter, less encumbered.  Some of it's likely that I am about to embark on a new adventure in India, and I feel like I'm finally stepping forward after a pretty introspective year post-ended-marriage.  Partly I have been eating a healthier diet as well.  But another big part of it is discovering some parts of me that have been like locked up, forbidden wings of an old mansion (and for some reason the palace in Beauty and the Beast pops into my head as the image for this...)

I always thought my family had problems of the kind that every family has, nothing out of the ordinary.  But the more I reflect, the more I realize how not normal it actually was.  I am hesitant to go into detail because it's the proverbial dirty laundry, so I am going to at least try to stay general instead of citing specific examples.  There was a dynamic in my family of my sister being the black sheep, the rebellious one, and the dominant emotion I remember feeling about the way my parents responded to her is fear.  I steered clear of frequently explosive situations between them, and I developed some obsessive, perfectionist habits and became the model student.  I behaved well to get my parents' approval instead of their wrath, and in doing so I limited which parts of me were allowed to be shown to the world, as well as to myself.  And I also absorbed a sense that my gain was linked to my sister's loss, which has created a long-standing sense of guilt, and I think some of the decisions I've made as an adult have been attempts at atonement for the injustice that has chafed at me for so long.

I feel like I should limit how much more I say about the past, but at this point the reason I'm feeling good, given all of the deep emotional stuff, is that I feel more like me.  I am seeing some good things that I didn't think were part of me, as well as realizing some not so great things I've thought about myself were actually imposed ideas that I don't have to buy into.  I see a less distorted version of myself and I like it (and I hope the process continues, I doubt it can be over yet).  I've decided not to keep trying to get complete acceptance and affirmation where it's never been offered, and I feel more able to take care of myself emotionally (taking care of the material things has never been difficult).  It's weird, I find myself thinking, "So this is what it's like to feel self confident and not depressed.  This is nice.  I hope it stays."

Struggles and Gifts

By most standards, it's been a rough day.  But what's on my mind now is not the difficulty of it, but the upshots and gifts I've received through it, so those are what I'm going to write about.

Sometimes I feel lonely because I have a fairly solitary life a lot of the time, but today I've felt connected and supported when I've needed it.  I have some great relationships, and I'm very grateful for them, though I may not always appreciate them the way that I should.

One of the relationships I have found more value in than ever is the one with myself.  Maybe that sounds strange, but being more aware of my own feelings and trying to listen and take better care of myself has made me feel calmer and more assured in the decisions I've made.  I feel like I know myself better now, and I'm a little wiser than I used to be.

I've been feeling more connected with God as well.  It's hard to write that sentence in a way, because the word and idea of "God" is so loaded and I don't like some of the conceptions that people have of God.  But what I mean is that I'm feeling more tapped into the loving, caring, and mindful spirit that's available and present in each moment.  Not an idea, but a reality to be experienced.  It's clicking more for me, in part thanks to Thich Nhat Hanh and Rob Bell who've helped articulate and guide my thinking lately.  It's sort of awakening my consciousness and renewing my interest in staying connected with some spiritual practice.

Heart in Motion

I'm on a sort of emotional upswing the past couple of weeks, possibly because I've started eating more nutritious food and I have more mental focus and energy than I did during the first couple of months of the year. And while I'm generally feeling pretty good about the state of things, there's also been a lot of troubling emotional stuff that I've been processing, though thankfully it's made easier by a few things, including the improvement in my overall health, the increased energy I feel for work and preparing to move next month, a very supportive relationship with my sister, and a therapist who is helping me to recognize and respond to the way I feel.

And speaking of feelings...the depth and range of emotions I've found myself experiencing makes me feel kind of crazy and unstable. I'm naturally analytical, and I've always tried to be very rational, objective, fair-minded, but I'm learning that there's deep wisdom in emotion as well. I have struggled at times to understand my feelings, especially the complicated ones over the last year or two while my marriage was ending and I began a new life on my own and now a new relationship with its own challenges. It's been unsettling to have such strong emotional responses in such variety, because I feel less in control than I ever have. But sometimes when I am talking with my therapist about what's going on in my life, I'm amazed how much insight comes from just recognizing my emotions, as well as how much I miss when I don't pay attention to them. I think I'm sort of on the remedial learning plan for feelings. For so long, I thought of them as a liability (and the feminist in me starts crying, "patriarchy!" since toughness and rationality are such valued masculine traits), but really they help balance and drive the best rational thought processes. They make sense of everything, because they tell us what's valuable.

This intertwining of emotions and rational thinking was the theme of a recent op-ed by David Brooks in the New York Times, and what he said resonated with me in this stage of my life. The full article is at this link, but an excerpt that particularly hit home for me was this:

"We have a prevailing view in our society — not only in the policy world, but in many spheres — that we are divided creatures. Reason, which is trustworthy, is separate from the emotions, which are suspect. Society progresses to the extent that reason can suppress the passions.

This has created a distortion in our culture. We emphasize things that are rational and conscious and are inarticulate about the processes down below. We are really good at talking about material things but bad at talking about emotion."

I really want to be better at articulating emotion, but first I've been trying at least to let it surface more. I feel like I've bought the rationality-drives-progress message for too long, and I'd like to evolve beyond it to value experiences more.

How we view everything

Americans are control freaks. This sentence has been popping up in my head over the past few weeks as I've been thinking about what things will be like when I stay in India for a few months. Spending small amounts of time in a lot of different places in the past year has kept me thinking about how the places where we live, the culture and the population density and even the weather, shape how we view everything.

For instance, America is freakishly efficiently run compared to India and has a lot of conveniences freely available. One of the consequences of this is that many Americans get really irritated by things like not having free unlimited wifi with the purchase of a cup of coffee. In some ways, I think Americans are not sufficiently grateful for all that we do have; but then, some of the reason why we have so many good systems is that we have high expectations. On the other hand, the sense I've gotten in India is that no matter how you'd like the system to work, you often can't do anything about it -- so I've found the Indians I know to be far more adaptable to external circumstances (which can be good and bad in turn) where Americans would likely try to bend circumstances to our will (which also has pros and cons). Americans try to control things because where we live makes us more likely to believe that we're actually able to (which is sometimes a dangerous belief).

Something that works hand in hand with this is that the American dream is all about the pursuit of individual goals. There is a sense that it's our birthright to acquire and achieve. India is not wired so individually - social status is not as malleable, and families are much more involved in things that Americans would consider very personal, individual decisions (like who to marry). People in India also live in closer proximity to one another in general than Americans do (at least in Mumbai, which is a huge city crammed full of people). It's something I've felt a lot recently -- the American isolation. Our connections are fewer and thinner than the ones I've seen in India, and we are less likely to get involved in other people's problems or personal lives, even those of our close friends and family. I have more freedom to be myself and do what I want here in the US, but that means I also end up spending more time by myself. In India, my existence and needs just feel like less of an inconvenience to other people because everyone I've met there is used to having a lot of other people around and being active participants in each other's lives. There's less personal space, but there also seems to be less loneliness (though for an expat, I have a feeling that at times I'll feel lonely even in a crowd).

I suppose that's all for now...perhaps to be continued another time. Maybe when I'm actually back in India. :)

Relationships are hard

Relationships are hard. It's something that I've heard over and over, and I've never doubted that it's true, but I feel like I've been really deeply learning the truth of it through my experiences over the last year or two. And lately I've also been thinking about what's important to me in my relationships and what has made the good ones so strong and the bad ones so disappointing.

I think all people want to be understood and affirmed, but feeling the connection of understanding and shared experience is maybe the most important way that I feel close to other people. That moment when somebody's talking about their own experience and they describe perfectly what I've been feeling is priceless. And then there are those rare people who can listen to me and, even if they haven't experienced what I'm going through, they still show such empathy for me. I feel very lucky to have some really great people in my life, and I feel like they teach me how to be a better person in relationship to others as well.

And then there's the buzzkill: the relationships where understanding is elusive and empathy is seemingly out of the question, where you hold out hope but it's continually challenged. I've been struggling with this type of relationship over the past couple of weeks, feeling misunderstood and disregarded by someone I care about. Because I can see more clearly what I appreciate about my healthy relationships, the void in this one is all the more gaping. My instinct is to have a tough conversation to try to reach some point of understanding each other, but I am also really frustrated by feeling that if I don't take the initiative to deal with it, it will just never be dealt with. I know ultimately I'll have the conversation, but...it's hard. It's hard to be humble enough to admit I've been hurt and to choke down the disappointment in order to seek reconciliation.

To come full circle, though, I'm realizing that no relationship just stays good, and the best I can do is to know myself well enough to be aware of how I'm feeling about it so that I can take action to reconnect with the other person. I used to see my feelings as a liability, but now I'm finding them incredibly informative and constructive. They're helping me bring more things to the surface that would otherwise bubble underneath and continue wreaking havoc.

Blog love

Sometimes I am self conscious about my blog. I wonder if, when my entries are read consecutively, they're just totally disjointed. I actually try to make them individual entries, so that I can maybe avoid writing the same thing I did at some point before; but I wonder if that makes me sound totally unstable and all over the place. There has been a lot going on in my life in the last year-plus now, a ton of change in work and relationships, a lot of traveling and absorbing, and a lot of thinking and panicking and celebrating through it all. And so it happens that while my last entry was focused on my feelings of loneliness, this one is joyful.

Maybe I've not said this before, ever, but...I'm in love. I'm characteristically private in my relationships and spare in my expressions of affection, but it sort of bothers me at times that I never let people get much of a glimpse into my happiness because I'm too busy keeping my cool and looking calm and collected. Sometimes I worry that people mistake me for a robot. But I am super smitten and so very grateful for this very lovely guy. I didn't know how good it could be (whatever "it" is), and I strongly suspect it's only getting better from here. With him, and with life in general, as tough as it all can be sometimes.

Alone

I'm feeling pretty aimless and down lately, since returning from Mumbai. And I kind of don't want to blog about it because it feels kind of pathetic and whiny, too. But in general, I feel like I'm not really connected into a community, and I don't really know how to be. I don't know if it's just normal for someone who lives alone, but I spend a LOT of time by myself, and it makes me feel lonely and unmotivated. I don't just think think I could disappear and it would take a long time for people here to notice - I know it's the case, because most people I know, I see maybe once every couple of months. And maybe lately I've been lazy about putting in the effort to reach out and find time to see people, but it's partly because I know that if I don't, it's unlikely that they will. Maybe all of us are just bad at getting out or making a point to see people; but at times I also realize that most people I know have family or close friends who they are making a point to spend time with, and so their limited time and energy are devoted to them. I don't have family or a significant other nearby, and I'm finding it challenging not having that sort of go-to companionship that I had for a few years while I was married but that I've been lacking for the past year or more.

Now, I'd like to think of myself as a strong and independent woman and not a pathetic whiner, but this line of thinking really doesn't help my self esteem. I'd like to feel self sufficient and be content spending time with myself; and I'd like to feel like I can be a social go-getter who can go out into the world and make friends easily. But neither of those descriptions fit me right now. I know I could make more effort to do more fulfilling individual activities (reading, drawing, cooking, etc.), which would make my time alone a lot less lonely; and I know I could get out more (I am beginning a textile screen printing class next week, so that's good). I need to do these things. But at times, I want to hang out with someone else who knows me -- oh, man, the Cheers theme song just popped into my head ("sometimes you wanna go where everybody knows your name...") I'm guessing other people know this feeling, too -- sometimes I don't want to just go out and be with strangers just to get out of the house, I want some familiarity, to be in relation to someone else as more than a bystander or passerby. I tend to relish my alone time a lot more if it doesn't feel like a sentence but is in balance with relationships.

I guess that's all for now...sigh.

One month in...

This year is already awesome, and I'm hopeful that it will only continue to get better.

The Packers are in the Super Bowl tomorrow. I'm really nervous, but also extremely excited. The last time they went was 1998. And it's vindication of my claims all season that they are better than their record indicated (they never lost by more than 4, and the sum of their loss margins across 6 games was smaller than the margin in one of the Bears' epic flops!) The only down side is that I wish I had Packers fans to watch with...being in Chicago makes this tough, so I'll most likely end up in a bar.

I went to an Indian wedding and spent most of January in Mumbai. It was fantastic, both the wedding and the rest of the time, which I spent working and socializing. I missed my friends in the US, but everyone in India has been so warm to me that I started feeling comfortable there quickly. And honestly, I don't see my American friends nearly enough when I am here...something about being adults and working and having babies and weddings -- we are all busy, so I have a pretty quiet solo existence. Being in India always makes me think about my roots, where I come from and how I've become who I am...because it's such a different place and requires a pretty different set of skills to operate in. I'll probably write more about that when I'm in a little more reflective and less excited mood.

After such an exciting January, I'm eager for the rest of the year because I'll get to see my friend Kris get married (and all of the fun that precedes the event) and plan for my next big international adventure -- I'll be in Mumbai May through September, and I'm basically freaking out with happiness and anxiousness about it. I'll probably talk more about it in the weeks and months to come, but for right now I'm just kind of overwhelmed...in a good way. :)

I have no idea what happens in October and beyond...but I'm okay with that. One thing at a time...