Cultural stress

Cultural stress is distinctly different from other kinds of stress. Cultural stress is what happens when you feel like an idiot because you didn't know the system and got in the wrong line. It is not being able to easily communicate what you need, or not being understood when you are doing so. It is walking past your favorite noodle stand only to have the smell make you crave grilled cheese and veggie sticks, and not noodles. Anything but noodles.  Cultural stress is what happens when you realize it is actually harder, longer, and more expensive to do something in your home country but you're going to wait anyhow because you just can't face another unknown, another thing to figure out. It is wanting to watch mindless television that you can actually understand. It is wanting to be able to understand your friends (culturally, not linguistically) and wishing they could understand you. It is being totally overwhelmed by the list of errands you have for the first few days you are home, and then realizing it is no big deal because you actually know where to get those items, or how to get them, or how to get yourself to that store. Cultural stress is being tired, not necessarily of anything in particular, but just tired, and feeling the weight of being an out of place foreigner in a very real way, even though nothing specific has happened.

By the time I land in Detroit on Saturday night, it will be 11 months and 2 days since I was last in my home culture, aside from a short overnight layover in Chicago last July. That's a long time for me, the longest I have ever been out of the US. And even though I am no longer in my first year here, the compounding factor of those 11 months and 2 days means that I am really feeling the cultural stress these days. Add to that the end of the school year stress and the stress of all the events that the month of June holds, and I am a bit of a wreck. Today, I managed to only dissolve into tears a few times and threaten my students with the firing squad once, or maybe twice.

I am so so blessed to be here, and I love my life in Thailand, but God Bless America, I can't wait to be on US soil!