My American life now is very different than what I thought it would be. When I made the decision to return to the U.S. after almost four years living overseas, I knew it wasn't going to be easy. I didn't contemplate how exactly it wasn't going to be easy and the details of all of that. I just knew.
A month after settling into life in Baltimore, I find myself being a bit of an odd ball. I can be an American because, well, I am white; and not that non-white people aren't American, they are, there's just not as much speculation living in a U.S. metropolitan city that I would be from Thailand, India or Switzerland. I am most definitely an American based on my level of student loan debt but not many people see that. Many people have commented on my accent: some say I am a Nuw Yawka, another guessed eastern European and others just don't know. When I tell people I don't have a car, they look at me with pity like I have lost something more important than a limb and almost apologize for how challenging my life must be.
I have become a side-walker - literally and metaphorically. I have seen and continue to see into the lives of other people from the periphery, trying to take the good and bad all for personal growth and good use.
In the last month, I have walked several miles to the grocery store and back, home from work, to the coffee shop, taking a stroll or just meeting people for dinner. I am a pedestrian. I have realized that life is a lot more vulnerable when you are not a car owner. I am subject to it all: beggars, weather, dogs and drivers on their cell phones swerving to miss hitting me while I cross the street when it's my turn signaled by that little man in the box who turned from red to white.
It looks safe and warm inside those cars. It looks comfortable, convenient. It is much faster than whatever means of transportation I am taking whether it be a bus, metro, light rail or my own two feet. While living in the U.S., I have never known life without a vehicle, until now. But I have learned more about Joe Smith walking down the street talking on his phone in much higher decibels than necessary speaking of taking a relationship to the next level or Jim Bob on the train calling his Mama about how maaaddd he be at Susie. Thus far I have fought the urge to buy ear buds in an effort to tune my and the rest of the world out in an effort to experience the world for what it is, despite unpleasantries.
Aside from the literal side-walking activities I have done of late, I find that my greatest challenge is in my mind - daily walking on all sides of my education, life experience and spiritual upbringing. I am a hodgepodge. I am becoming more and more resistant to norms. Perhaps I live in one of the most dangerous cities in the world because I am used to living in adventure. My refrigerator only contains food for this week because my British partner has taught me other people live with one the size of a shoe box and survive. In a month, I am abandoning my smart phone for a Haitian Chinese Nokia. My apartment is full of African art. I am strange, or so the world around me and the voices of my past experience at battle with each other tell me.
I am trying to embrace my place in my strange-ness. I notice that it challenges people, even makes them uncomfortable. When I tell someone I am walking a mile home, they get a sense of obligation to drive me verbalizing that it is too far to walk. Or when I offer to pay for dinner, I get a sense of surprise and shock that people still do that. The man asking for food outside the grocery store who I gave bananas too, he was taken-aback that anyone would actually fulfill his request.
I have American blood in my veins, Jesus in my heart, British in my vocabulary, second-hand store on my person and the desire to live simply from the poor in Africa.
This is me.
