I am still working on being open and present, in my day to day relationships and in the deeper relationships with friends and family that may only surface in too-infrequent emails and phone calls and holidays, but offer a mirror of my progress and a reminder of who I am.
I am still working to put all the pieces of myself together. To see who I have been and who I am and who I want to be. I struggle sometimes with the self I see reflected in others. For instance, after my parents' divorce it was hard for me to interact with quite a few people who'd known me for a long time. They (you) saw the same person they had seen before, but all the pieces of me had come apart and I didn't know for a long time which ones to keep. I had defined myself by my family's life together, by our house and neighborhood, by the fact that I homeschooled, by the time I had for my friends, and I lost those things. It took a while for me to get my feet under me again, and even after I did old relationships were often a sharp reminder of how much had changed. This has been true of other transitions since then, though to a lesser extent. I change and want to move on, and don't always know how to interact with people I knew before.
I don't want that to stay true. I don't want to see my own struggles in your faces. I am learning to define myself as the intersection of all of your lives, as this beautiful point of opportunity to learn from you and share something of what I see. I am learning to look forward to the worlds of people and experiences I have ahead of me.
One of the clearest things I feel about my own identity is the necessity of travel. I didn't apply to ISU because I grew up in Ames, I grudgingly stayed in state for the tuition, and did not even consider staying in the US after I graduated. I don't have anything against the US, but it just felt wrong to be there last year and seriously added to the stress of my last year at UIowa. As much as I am struggling with my classes and my self this semester, I am definitely on the right continent.
In school news again, yesterday I wrote almost 1,000 characters of my civil law paper on the way that the Stubborn Nail House owners (钉子户） (who refuse to move when the government licenses their land for development) and their treatment in the media signal the recent developments in civil society in China. Woohooooo. I have done very little today.
Today's title brought to you by Dig by Incubus
Today's almost title #1 brought to you by 23 by Jimmy Eat World (I felt for sure last night// That when we said goodbye// No one else will know these lonely dreams)
Today's almost title #2 brought to you by Wasting Time by Jack Johnson (Nobody knows anything about themselves// 'Cause they're all worried about everybody else)
Countdown to Christian: 24 days (24, Christian Yetter! Fools round down!)
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This kind of applies to what you’re talking about. It’s really more of some thought’s I’ve been having in general….
ReplyDeleteI think identity and technology are intimately intertwined. As technology improves life-styles in many cases improve. For example from the time my grandmother was born till she entered her vocational training school at 18, she bathed in a little metal tub. Her training school was where she first encountered showers. This was a life-style improvement, she no longer had to heat the water and bring it to the little tub. She could now simply go in turn a handle and whoosh there came the hot water. The time it took to heat the bath water before, could be used now for other things: taking longer times in the shower, reading, hanging out with friends, etc.
With every technical improvement it becomes easier to perform a task and reduces the time and labor it use to take to perform that task. On the farm where three generations use to work and live, where all hands were needed to insure survival, where now the young ones have gone off to college, gotten jobs in the city and aren’t coming back because there is now equipment in place to do their work. Many people have more opportunities to learn, to create, to excel in a world which technology is making smaller.
The smaller world comes at a price, one that I don’t think we at this time can measure. In Germany where half my family lives, the majority have left our ancestral village. My uncle and his family are the only ones who remained behind, there they know their neighbors, and the village knows them. This May within two hours of my walking up to their front door from the train station the whole village knew I was there and who I was. But this is not the norm anymore.
The norm now is to pick up the newspaper and read about what so and so did in China, India, Australia, Honduras, Russia, France, Mozambique etc. One of my friend’s is of Chinese descent and we’re just as comfortable discussing Jay Chou and Wilber Pan as we are discussing Jack Johnson and Kenny Chesney. I’m a German born in the U.S. I listen to music from Germany, China, India, England, America, Israel, Russia, and South Africa (usually in their native languages). One of my friends listens to Spanish radio and music, and lives with a girl of Indian descent who speaks Hindi, English, Russian, and Spanish. Another friend follows Australian rugby cause she likes the team, but she has never been to Australia. This points to the blurring of what was once thought stereotypically one culture or another.
As technology improves to allow the quicker transfer of information, the world becomes smaller as I watch German and Chinese news shows from the comfort of my living room in Waterloo, Iowa. The things I see and like, I adopt and use. I listen to music, watch shows and movies, eat food, play instruments, read books, etc. originating in other countries. Then what I have learned I spread among my friends. Pretty soon “the five girls from Iowa with the American cultural background” become “the five girls from Iowa who incorporate German, Chinese, Indian, English, America, Israeli, Arabic, Russian, Australian, Turkish, Greek, Polish, French, Honduran, Mexican, and Korean (just to name a few) cultural elements into everyday life.”
This makes identity, which is something I find myself pondering as well, harder to define. Identity is no longer just defined by the immediate culture in one’s little village, today the world is quickly replacing the village and we’re quickly adopting an individually defined multi-cultural identity definition. Technology makes life-styles easier, but it blurs the simplistic us vs. them of a singular world view, and is replaced by multi-culture view arising from individual tastes and family diasporas. They say "It takes a village to raise a child," so what happens when the village is replaced by the world?
Well said, my thoughtful friend!
ReplyDeleteThat's very much part of what I have been struggling with (my interior mental dealio is related, but not necessarily the same...)
It does mean SOMETHING that I was born in the US, that my parents were born in North America, that two of my grandparents were born in the US and two in Germany. It means SOMETHING that I am from Iowa, that I have lived in China, that I have traveled in Germany in Egypt. But I think it means a lot more that the barriers between 'us' and 'them' are getting a lot fuzzier, and places and cultures are less and less the only or even best way to connect with people.
mmmm
Come to China and let's drink tea and talk about it, okay? :D
SO EXCITED.