Delayed Culture Shock

I have finally realized after almost 3 months of being home; that returning from a year and a half over seas is not as easy as I once believed. It could have possibly been denial or a suppression of the changes that I had made over the last year and a half but the facade is over. The culture shock of being back in the US has set in with tragic deepness this last week. To understand I will back up a little. Almost two years ago I decided to serve an LDS mission, at the time it was more of a decision to escape from looming decisions about my future than a search for spirituality. Ironically I found the latter and only prolonged the first. So in this desperate escape I found myself with a paper that told me I was called to serve in the Singapore Mission(which turned out to be the Malaysian mission for me) and a one way ticket to South East Asia. Understandably frightened about the huge change I had just made in my life the first couple of weeks were a nightmare and I found myself wishing I was home. Then I fell in Love!....(not with a boy, that's against the rules) I fell in love with the people and the food with crazy unfamiliar customs and traditions; with traditional music and with the land that I now called home. Now it was the thought of leaving this amazing and awesome place that frightened me. Unfortunately, countries don't make a habit of giving residence to persons that fall in love with there country. So at the end of my service I was given another one way ticket that scared me more than the first one did. I was headed for America. A scary place of well spoken English and lots of white people and blan food. You might think my fears are silly as to being able to speak English and seeing lots of white people but anyone that has lived in a foreign country like Malaysia for an extended period of time will agree that those fears are horribly justified. And yet the acceptance of returning was not over powered by the since of panic I felt when reaching America. At least not until last week when I hit a brick wall and realized that my running was finished and that I had to face and over come the culture shock of being a real person again in the country I was born.

In Malaysia I could be who ever I wanted to be a fantastically liberating feeling. No one there had preconceived notions of my personality or my flaws. I was free to grow and become anyone I chose to become. This provided me with a unique situation in which I could develop with out the hindrance of presumption. Coming home I wanted to naively continue that dimension of my life but that was impossible because when I returned I was seen not in the eyes of those who had witnessed me change but in the eyes of those who expected an ideal of the same person that had left a year and a half before. I went from being completely free to being confined helplessly in the views of others. Have you ever heard of the saying that a river will always run the path of least resistance. Well so does human behavior, unless motivation and determination are released to push us in a different direction. So I was trapped in the flow, sure I put up a fight at the beginning. I tryed to prove, by my superior demeanor and example all that I had learned and changed in myself over the last year and a half but 21 years of conditioning people to think of me in a certain way was not easily over come. So instead of fighting I hid my new enlightenment to keep it safe, hoping someday I would use it again. In the next few weeks with out even a second thought I started to drift into what I remembered as comfortable. It was the path of least resistance. It was easier to act the way people perceived me then to let my new and more brilliant self show through. An interesting concept, that the way we treat others could be directly correlated with the way they act. It was true in my case and all the things that I disliked and that I had mended on my mission crept back into my life with a vengeance. Those tumultuous habits of behavior became my life again. It was not a direct decision but rather a slippery slope of unconscious acts.

Sometimes we find ourselves far from our destination because we inadvertently took the path of least resistance and when we finally realize we are not were we are supposed to be, that's the definition of an epiphany. We have all had those epiphany moments when life comes crashing down around us and we realize that what we have been doing is completely irrational. Well mine happened last week. I had an experience that opened my eyes to the fact that I had been running from my problems instead of facing them. Funny thing was, I was running at the time. I realized as my feet slushed through the snow and looking up into the darkening sky that blanketed the mountains. I wasn't in Kansas any more. That's when it hit me, the wall came down and two worlds clashed. In two words I believe we could call that, "culture shock". Integrating back into life here in the US has been a struggle. but, Now it is apparently clear to me why the word shock is associated with earthquakes, the aftermaths of tragic accidents and cultural changes. It's not as pleasant as one would guess, it's not even amusing but it is a mechanism to show that the worst is over and it helps us prioritize for the next event.

Don't worry, I don't have everything solved. I'm still trying to figure out how to deal with all the really tall white people and blan food.