I could not find myself today
I got lost in reflection
retracing steps all along the way
(back to days of no direction)

living my life without connection
to the One who’d always seen within, who knew my heart and my intention


My brain doesn’t work like everyone else’s. I feel like, where they are nicely 2D, traveling in a straight line with an occasional stray “random” comment, I caper awkwardly about between 3 planes, perhaps even a few added non-existent ones, in flailing attempts to express myself – more of a mini trail straight, then upwards, then crashing down again into a subject of who-knows-what (the hell) that who-knows but somewhere in my internal self how on earth it is related to the price of tea in china.

This inability to stay on topic could be labeled ADD…I think not. I don’t have issues concentrating in school; if I knew one thing about myself it’s that I was (emphasis on WAS) forever the top student in my classes. I am really more inclined to take the blame for it (as though who I am is something to feel guilty for.) If only I could have put myself in the right situations, reacted differently…it’s all a matter of will-power, right?

I wonder sometimes how much is related to ‘my’ third-culturalism. (TCKs, as they’re known – third culture kids. Don’t belong in one, or the other … just kind of make up their own and get by. After they’ve accustomed themselves to one place, you think they’re ordinary people…but there’s a who ‘nother side waiting, if you only knew how to get to it. Born in a different country, moved ‘back’ to the States at age three, decided to return right before 5th grade and spend a few years there again learning a new language, to the US which I’d disowned by that point for all of high school crappy high school…a year in the UK…now here. I’m starting to get used to it here. Most on that later – I could go into detail…but anyway – do you see where come some “identity issues”?

So this schizophrenically frantic way of speaking/thinking is potentially related to that. Not that it does it to everyone – everyone’s different, and copes with overwhelming circumstances in various ways. As long as you don’t drown, you’re still alive. So they say.

Sometimes I look at myself and who other people see me as (from my perspective) – and realize I’ve given up. Why bother talking when they’re not going to be able to make our my words, anyway – when sometimes, I get the look I got in Austria of “you are speaking a foreign language” though I’m in the States, surely speaking my native English. (Last time I checked.)

Do you see how this could be a challenge for relating to the generality of humankind?
And if that relating is the one thing that means everything to me in life, the loss of it causes some severe feelings of misfortune…

Yes, I can make small-talk – if I want to, I learned the art last year, actually. Sort of. But I can live on that level as long as a fish can live out of water…then … suffocation…
(So much waits to be known.) Besides, there is never need for small talk. It's just that few have the art of drawing a person out, asking them real, interesting, good, imaginative questions ,and everyone should.

Basically, I want some psychologist to tell me (so I know I haven’t been making excuses all these years) that the truth is, I’m screwed up for having lived overseas. I’m not the only one in this boat, but the ones who aren’t in it … let’s just say, you don’t really get it. We can be friends, yeah – but I’ll never understand how you can be so deeply attached to your friends and house and family, and you’ll never get that I like the idea of being the rolling stone that collects no moss. I’d like to say I’m on a deeper level, but Chesterton has recently thrown a twist in that perspective, so I’m in the process of rethinking it. In “Heretics” he makes the, to me, shocking statement that “the globe-trotter lives in a smaller world than the peasant.”

Huh.

The globe-trotter “has not the patience to become part of anything.” I identify with that. A man who “can endure anything…but not permanent presence in one place.” ----

It’s like highways – how they’re meant to make the world better, ppl can travel and visit their relatives all over. But actually it makes it smaller – they just move further away with moving vans down the miles of smooth slick pavement and don’t return. They always talk about globalization making the planet smaller; when you run into someone you knew from grade school at the Eiffel tower you’re inspired to sing “It’s a small world after all.”

Dang.

I pray don’t me wrong now. I’ve enjoyed being first at church potlucks around the country. That old music – DeGarmy and Key, PFR, dc Talk brings nostolgia of a small appartment in the Alps with emotions shared only by my little brother… And not that I was conscious of the “identity issues” until I came back into contact with people who really HAD lived in one house in one town all their life. Wow.

What’s it mean to get used to being somewhere? It means you’re comfortable enough to be yourself, .......tbc Some of them are amazing at it – I don’t understand how you can get in a new situation and just jump in. There’s too much of me at stake; if I do, I might – again – drown.

Or maybe, as far as me and how I think, it’s just my effort to have ideas when I don’t really have any in the first place. …no…can’t be…it’s just how they’re (not) organized. … -

How you look at US from a distance, revel and pride, then loathing disgust from closer up...

It’s interesting to go back in life and figure out what made me how (as far as it’s plausible). Maybe it’ll help other pplz – if I can be honest – and face my self – but is it really good to face myself, at least alone? Cuz I’m as scary a person as the next, as complex…and myself facing myself…I need a creepy metaphor/analogy for it but it’s not a pretty picture. Skeletons battling in the graveyard at newmoon?

AHHHHHHH...