progress

I'm experiencing a rather weird life phenomenon. The meds I had been on until recently regulated my sleep pattern pretty heavily - like clockwork, an hour after I took a pill, I fell forcibly and soundly asleep and remained so for 9 or 10 hours, on average. Now that the medication is a thing of the past, so is that sleep pattern. I'm back to my "normal" (i.e. in my country of origin, interacting for the most part in my native language, with a reasonable job) baseline of 7-1/2 hours or so.

Some elementary mathematics will lead one to the conclusion that I now have around 15 hours a week of consciousness that I didn't have before. Add to this the reasonable amount of free time that my job offers me (in contract to the last one, which burgeoned and swelled to encroach upon every waking hour), and you come up with... actually a bit of a snafu.

In my (otherwise fairly useless) Christian Education class, we talked about "making meaning" as the basic task of human existence. You make meaning based on what you do and what you think about and what your basic values are. I have spent a lot of energy in recent years making meaning based on two significant situations:

1.) Being a foreigner, compensating for a growing but imperfect command of language and understanding of culture.
2.) Having a job that was so far over my head in terms of responsibility and skills that I spent every waking moment either doing the work, trying to stop thinking about the work, or acquiring the appropriate skills to do the work.

And while I don't miss my Wittenberg life one tiny little iota, there is definitely something missing from my life now. In a way I kinda miss that weight of responsibility. It was addictive, it was challenging, it was affirming in a way that workaholics can surely empathize with. I had a clearly defined role in the community, I was never at a loss for something to do, and loneliness had to creep in stealthily around the dominating work schedule.

And now I have what I had been so desperately coveting - people around me constantly, a location that allows out-of-town friends to drop by expectedly or unexpectedly, a reasonable amount of free time.

And I'm facing a question that had gone latent in my life - um, who am I now that I'm not a missionary or a director or a foreigner? I no longer have only ultimately predictable conversations based solely around my country of origin, length of stay in the particular location, acquisition of target langauge, and opinion of our elected leader. Now that I'm not a commodity simply by virtue of being in the "wrong" place, I have to figure out who the hell I am in this place.

And I have to make meaning. Fifteen hours a week MORE of meaning, now.

It hasn't been easy. Since the day I came back it's been a continuous internal struggle to align my behaviors to the predominant culture while also retaining the core of who I am (which is in flux anyway). It's been a huge struggle trying to recalibrate friendships and figure out how our long-distance pattern of staying in touch translates to the new shorter-distance one. I've messed that up in more than one instance and am starting to feel the repercussions.

My life went out of whack in several important ways in the past year or so. My very big job now is to sift through all of those issues and start myself along the path to resolving them. I need to do this one issue at a time. So please, those of you who know me in real life, have patience with me. I'll get there.

I'm still lonely and scared and overwhelmed sometimes. But at least now I have the feeling that I can handle it.