Well, after my last post had settled with me I felt a little
obnoxious. If people are interested in reading my blog—why, thank you. I’m
flattered. I spoke to Jenny on the phone today and she mentioned she’s been
catching up on my blog and I immediately apologized for the post… I hadn’t
realized she was still reading and it was just a reminder that I may not know
exactly who is reading my blog, and furthermore, the people I’m writing my blog
for are all people who I care about, and who care about me. So, while this is
ultimately for me, it is also for those who care enough about me to keep
reading. It is for those who think that what I write is interesting, and for those who
it speaks to in some way. Perhaps even in a way that I personally could
not, or that no one can at this point. So I suppose it’s time to stop
belittling myself and this very self-serving writing
and accept that it has been a wonderful and therapeutic thing for me and the friendships that have grown as a result of it (whether I am
fully aware of it or not).
Whew, now that I’ve got that aside. Thailand. What’d it do for
me? What’d it do to me? And where does it leave me now? Okay, so the where it
leaves me now is a bit much for a blog post, and thus this is going to be entirely
reflective: What did it do for me?
It changed me. A lot.
I know I mentioned that I have fallen back into some of my
earlier mind traps now that I’m home again, but I have also learned to deal
with those traps much better. I’ve gained a more open understanding of those
around me and of how I interact with them. Forgive me if this is redundant
because I’ve mentioned it to a number of people already and may have touched on
it in my blog, but Thailand changed me primarily in two ways: it changed how I
interact with others and it changed how I view the path I see ahead of me.
I’ll focus this post on interactions. Well, I never posted
that language post I’d been crafting, although I’m sure I still will at some
point. So briefly, being surrounded by so many other languages was absolutely
thrilling. It was more than that, it was exhilerating, it was contradictory, it
was rewarding, and it was damn hard. Really, really hard. Speaking French with
Miléna was SO much fun, but it took me until our last dinner together before I felt comfortable conversing only in French, and even then I still
brought in the occasional English phrase. It’s hard and it’s scary to be stuck
in a language that you don’t know. It took me a while to realize what it felt
like for the Burmese people I worked with to speak in English. When you are
struggling with a language so many people look at you like you’re less intelligent
and just plain dumb. I would say more on this, but I have déjà vu about a blog
post where I made the connection between dumb (eg: stupid) and dumb (eg:
literally unable to talk), so sorry if I’ve said this before. Well to put it simply, succinctly, and as always, eloquently: that
feeling sucks. It is so frustrating to know that you are as (or more)
intelligent than someone, but just lack the vocabulary to get it across. This
realization took me a while to come to, but now that I have grown aware of it I
find that it translates in many different ways.
Namely, this inability to best express oneself has nagged me
visciously in my own tongue, and no one is free from the trap of having words
come out wrong. But this realization has developed in me, very basically, a
greater acceptance of others. This is not to say I won’t point others out on their
contradictions, because I will, but I will not (generally) hold these mistakes against them.
Yeeeeet, I feel very contradictory saying this because I find
that while I now place more emphasis on the intentions behind words when listening to
others, I still at the same time realize the importance of words and how
particularly we must craft them in order to be most accurately understood. I
suppose I can expand on this conundrum most clearly by laying out two examples.
When I was in Thailand I received an email from someone I know
and respect, but whose words I had never seen in writing. While reading his
email I was surprised by his misspellings and occasional grammar mistakes but
realized that my admiration for him mixed with my newfound appreciation for what
lies behind poor grammar (ahem,
decoding Burmenglish emails) kept me from judging him on them. However, I
realized that had I read this email in a different context, I may have thought
lesser of him based on this one skill. And how ridiculous is that? Yes, okay,
the ability to write is in many ways an indicator of intelligence. But… what kind of intelligence exactly? The writer
I’m referencing is, as I mentioned before, someone I greatly respect and
admire, and I have to say, pretty freakin intelligent in my opinion as well. So
why should his writing, something he never was given the chance to cultivate
(or he never saw as necessary to cultivate) alter my view of him? Well, in this
case, it absolutely shouldn’t. And, thanks to some view-changing experiences,
it doesn’t. That said, it does not lead me to think my own writing skills are
unimportant. Just because I grant him those concessions does not mean that I
expect others to do the same for me.
My second example is shorter to explain, though in experience
much deeper. And that one is my relationship with Miléna. She and I began as
shy friends, me speaking quickly and nervously in English (I was a bit of a
spazz-case when I first arrived at FED, I will admit it…), her nodding
occasionally and responding in slow, methodical English, responding to maybe ¾
of what I was saying (a good percentage, I would soon realize). Now, it is true
that our relationship grew from one of acquaintances to one of quick and comfortable
friends thanks to our increasing ease with our positions at FED, the copious
amounts of time we spent together, and her rapid improvement at English (not to
mention rainy late night post-bar bike rides, ocean romps, and countless
wonderful conversations over green curry, fried rice, or just our singha water
bottles in the spider-webbed volunteer room) but I would be remiss if I did not
attribute a large part of why we became such close friends to a growing
acceptance in each of us for the unspoken words lurking behind apparent miscommunications. During many of the
aforementioned conversations there were many moments of potential
misunderstandings, but at the end of the day each of us understood the other’s
intent, and whether we agreed or not we were each still able
to grant the other the acceptance and understanding needed to keep the
conversation going.
This acceptance comes from a realization that not only can
words sometimes not fully express something, but that even if there were words
that could completely, perfectly express a point, we can still easily make due
without them. This is not to say that I feel I don’t need to express myself any
better (in English or French), but merely that even though the majority of us
can’t express ourselves as well as we’d like, miscommunications are not the end
of the world. If we face others with a little more acceptance, we may realize
that beneath these miscommunications we aren’t really being misunderstood after
all. During many arguments I have often been known to roll my eyes and say,
“it’s only semantics”. Now, that’s a cowardly way out of an argument,
particularly because those semantics do often matter, for example, in politics.
But truly, when it comes to life and our day-to-day exchanges, underneath those
petty matters of semantics we’re basically all saying the same thing anyway: “I
want to be understood, and I want to understand you.”
So that’s big lesson #1 from Thailand. It’s okay if you let
little “misunderstandings” slide by, as long as there’s agreement on the
underlying message. (And now I will end this post before my counter-argument
threatens to bubble over a few more pages… this is a nuanced topic, so don’t
think I naively believe it’s settled just because I choose this as a closing)
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