Home is where...um...er...

So, it’s been a while.  But there are reasons.  I really don’t like feeling like I use this blog as a platform to complain.  But it’s the middle of July now, and in the interest of complete honesty, I’m just gonna say it.  This summer has not been the easiest of my life so far.  Luckily, there have been some high points scattered amongst the lows, or I might have given up and crawled straight into bed for at least a month.  My summer plans for Guatemala all unraveled at the last minute, while I was at an airport just outside of London.  That was a low.  But I was taken in and cared for and entertained by Leah and Pete’s warm and wonderful English family.  That was a high, and I felt really blessed to have people who cared for me around at just the right moment.  Then I came back to Poland and found a lot of empty days stretching before me with no work waiting here for me to do.  Low.  But I had a few people here to help me fill my spare time and to help me scrounge up a lesson or two, and my boss wrote me a recommendation so I could try to get summer camp work, and it seemed like it might be manageable after all.  Maybe not a high, per se, but at least a little bump in the right direction.

But this week has not been good.  I got some bad news from my mother, and it wasn’t remotely feasible for me to fly back to be with my family.  And it’s pretty lonely here right now.  I don’t mean to sound ungrateful for the friends I have here, but sometimes when things are bad, what you really need around you are the people that you know you can call in the middle of the night if you have to, even if it’s just to talk.  The ones who know you well enough to just turn up, even though you didn’t ask.  The ones who you can really cry in front of – you know the ones…you’re so upset that your face is all red and puffy and you’ve got snot coming out of your nose, and they act like they don’t even notice.  Those people, for me, are pretty far away.  Skype helps, but there’s still a seven hour time difference to contend with, and sometimes there’s a delay, or your internet stops working for no reason, or whatever. 

And this has all got me thinking about home.  What is ‘home’?  Because I don’t really know if I have one anymore.  I had a long talk with my best friend tonight.  She said that, for her, it’s all about deciding who you want to spend your life with.  Then anyplace is home.  No matter where you live, there are going to be shitty things about it, but if you’re around the right people, then you’ll always be home.  I’m inclined to agree, but that doesn’t wrap it all up as neatly as you’d think.  My family and most of my dearest friends are in the United States.  But the idea of moving back there fills me with dread.  I want to live someplace where at least I can go to the doctor if something’s wrong with me.  I want to live someplace where I’m not constantly being told I have to have a lucrative job, or a mortgage, to feel successful.  I want to live someplace where my kids won’t be made fun of for being know-it-alls if they should happen to like to read or watch documentaries about how the human body works or where our food comes from.  I want to live someplace where gun violence is virtually irrelevant, because nobody has guns.  And I don’t meet a lot of people there who feel as strongly as I do about those things.  And they don’t have to.  But it’s hard to feel you belong someplace where your core values are so different from everyone around you.  It’s hard to imagine finding a partner and making a good life there. 

But.  There is something very fragile about life as an expat.  Especially here.  When I had no work in Wisconsin, I got a job waiting tables for extra cash.  That’s illegal for me here, even if I spoke enough Polish to do the job.  My grasp on the language is tenuous at best, so though I can afford to visit the doctors, they’re intimidating.   And that also makes it hard to make friends with anyone but the other English teachers, who come and go on 9-month contracts.  So (and this is the important point) there is a considerable scarcity of the kind of friends I described above.  And this is partly my own fault.  I could’ve made more of an effort this year.  But I worked a lot, and I spent a lot of time with people who’ve now either moved away or who have their own lives here, based on something other than just the job they happened to have (their partners, families, school, etc.).  I never planted myself that fully in this community.  And if I’m honest, I probably never will, because Szczecin is not really the place I envision myself settling in and growing old. 

So, what do you do?  It’s tempting to believe that you can just keep moving around until you find the right thing, but I’ve seen people who’ve done that and found themselves just as aimless at 35 as they were at 20.  There’s also some comfort in the idea that if you just commit to some random choice you’ve made, you’ll make it all come together eventually.  But as I learned from law school, if you force yourself to commit to something that is just not right for you, you can end up several years older, deeply in debt, and even more confused than when you started out.  Maybe it’s blind alchemy.  Make the best choices you can from where you are,  commit yourself to them as completely as you can, hope everything doesn’t fall apart, make subtle adjustments when it does, repeat, repeat, repeat.  Nothing is perfect, but slowly it takes shape. 

I hope so, anyway, cause that’s the best plan I’ve got right now.

Sorry for whining.  I’m sure it will all be better tomorrow.  Or the next day.