So people say that moving to a new place is a new chance for a change of identity. You can recreate yourself and change any things you didn’t like about yourself in the past or you can add new elements to your life that would be too far of a leap in your past life. Where am I going with this? I knew that this identity change could happen, but I didn’t necessarily think that living in Mali would change me that much. When you’re joining the Peace Corps you read a lot of literature about how you’re going to go find yourself. Well, what does that even mean? Honestly, two years ago, “finding myself” wasn’t on my list of to do’s in Mali, however, it’s definitely been checked off and done!
It started with something as simple as going to the tailor here and having some Malian clothes made. Or wearing ridiculously big, beaded necklaces, which I’ve recently been called a patron for wearing. The outside appearance was the easy stuff – a change of clothes or wearing new jewelry. Things got complicated when my personality traits started changing and I wasn’t necessarily prepared for it.
So, how do you find yourself? Well, take yourself out of the culture and country that you’re most comfortable in and compromise everything about your life and things start to change. You realize that a lot of your personality traits and idiosyncrasies are a product of your environment. What examples can I give? In America I was pretty uptight about things. There were deadlines, there was money to be made/that needed to be made, there was shit to do. My last year in America I was at school full time, working 30 hours a week (minimum), organizing a conference, having ankle surgery and doing physical therapy and applying for the Peace Corps (which is pretty intense). There wasn’t time to take a step back and look at my life and see what was going right or wrong. I wore black pants and pointy-toed shoes and wore subtle jewelry because everyone else in DC was doing it and why be the fish swimming upsteam in a city where no one else is? I wanted to fit it and I did and it was nice.
So, here I am in Mali, wanting to fit in again. The problem is that fitting in here and in America is totally different. And now that I’ve fit in here, and I’m not uptight about everything and “American” about everything, it’s awesome. I feel great! But, how to I re-assimilate into America? How do I stay Malian in America? I don’t know. It’s going to be really hard. I know who I want to be, even if I wasn’t that person before, but I’m worried about the constraints of American society on who that person is. I also worry that my friends and family will expect me to be a certain person – i.e. the person I used to be – and I want to change. Is that going to be weird for people? Are they not going to know how to react with me or what?
Anyway, I think I’m having an identity crisis – yikes! – and think that this crisis will continue when I arrive in America next year. I just want to ask everyone to be accepting of this change. There will be a lot that has changed and you can accept me and the changes or not. We’ll see how this plays out!
