I'm fading.
Fragments of myself have been slipping away piece by piece, and I'm not even sure sometimes who or what is left.
I used to dance - not well, but freely. I used to hit the club, check my Self in at the giant speaker in the corner, and then lost myself in the rhythms. But my husband doesn't dance, so now neither do I.
I used to sing. I wasn't terrible, but certainly no Patti La Belle. Still, I could often be seen in my car making the ugly faces, lettin' loose to the blasting stereo. Hip-hop (old-school), R & B, Classic Soul...Now I listen to kids' music, mostly, because my daughter complains when I try to listen to mine, and honestly, some of mine contains lyrics that I don't want the kids listening to. Also, my husband and I generally have divergent tastes, so we look for what's tolerable to the both of us and compromise.
Compromise. This is what happens when you marry outside of your own culture, except that it tends to end up swaying toward one or the other, so the compromise is inevitably imbalanced.
I'm Nemo the fish: snatched from my ocean and plunked into this fishbowl. Totally my own doing, but I still miss home. The other fish in this tank are reasonably nice, but they aren't enough, at least not yet, to make it home.
And yet, I've always straddled the lines between worlds, have always been multi-cultural in a sense. When I was very little, I enjoyed Barry Manilow just as much as disco music. Now the choices are more along the lines of: pasta and meatballs or rice and beans; hard rock or R & B; khakis and a polo shirt or baggy jeans and a t-shirt. Back in the day, though, they were: rice and beans or oxtails; Salsa or Hip-hop; bright florals or African prints. No big difference when you get right down to it. My cousin's friend once commented, "She's not black, she's Puerto Rican." Hmm...he must have been looking at someone across the street.
The difference is that right now my Self seems to be MIA. There was an apparent theft when I wasn't looking. I checked my Self somewhere, turned around for a second, and then it was gone.
It's really no wonder that I identify so much with Bella Swan - I am Bella in some ways, without the fun of having a sexy-as-hell vampire and werewolf in love with me (that I know of), and Talair. More accurately, Talair is me, or will be soon, although she doesn't know it yet. IT will be painful news to deliver.
So what's a fragmented gal like me to do? I suppose if I had money I could go take some sort of cultural dance class. If I had more time I could do more yoga; that at least helps to lift me above sides and fences, and I can just be without needing to choose. Yoga puts the pieces back together in such a way that the parts are irrelevant. There is only one whole.
For today, Dave is my glue. I've been listening to the Dave Matthews Band this morning, and he's been talking my ear off. Talair will be busy come November. DMB has become for me like that speaker in the club: I can check my Self in at Boyd's fiddle bow or Leroi's high hats and know that my Self will be safe when I get back. They never require that I choose, only that I listen and let go. Hmm...probably not the wisest thing to do while driving, by the way.
I am wondering if my depression is a cause or effect of this loss of identity. Perhaps it's a bit of both. At any rate, balancing right smack in the middle of the fence has felt pretty good today. I haven't felt like I'm missing anything. I've actually been just one person today - just me.
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1 comment:
This may not seem related, but it is.
I grew up in a large metropolitan area and was surrounded, not every day, perhaps, but in a general way by all sorts of people - different colors, different builds, different religions - this, to me, is normal.
When I went to Italy my junior year I was living in Florence, not a southern Italian city, and it seemed pretty normal to me. There are lots of tourists in Florence, Norhtern Italians who do not look like the stereotypical idea Americans have of Italians, etc. But then I took a train trip to Milan, got off the train, and OMG - there was a whole city of people who looked like me.
It seems that Milan had a lot of people from the economically depressed South of Italy working there. The Milanese might not look like me, but those other s did, and it struck me as - strange.
I think it i spart and parcel of any free society where people can choose jobs, spouses, religions, and housing with at least a fair degree of freedom that one is going to get all kinds of mixes going on. I think it is normal, and I think it is healthy, but it is not always easy. When two people have grown up surrounded by the same things, hearing the same ideas, wearing the same clothes, they know what they are expected to like, whether they do or not, and I have no idea what problems that creates. I can't even imagine it.
In my case, I am actually more comfortable with the culture my DH supposedly comes from than he is. He, however, is more comfortable with the mainstreams of our socio-economic stratum than I am. Etc.
Certainly, class and culture enter into these sorts of clashes, but I think that every couple has their conflicts over the details of everyday living, and I think that in general women tend to give in to keep the peace. It is very easy to loose w hole parts of yourself. There are some one does not mind so terribly letting go, and then there are the others - you pick your battles, you don't die on every hill. Still, sometimes you miss things you don't even want that much, just because they speak of some part of home or youth or life before compromise. And the things you really want, and yet can't fit in...it's hard.
Hmmm. Not sure that actually added anything to what you said, but it might have elaborated on it...
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