A Quiet Readjustment

I remember how culturally shocked I was being home after my first year abroad. Getting used to live in the States as a seventeen year old made everything in Indonesia wrong. It was too hot, too loud, too dirty, too humid, too messy. The foods were still good but they could’ve done better aesthetically. I could’ve been louder than I had been, if the people from the youth exchange program didn’t remind me in advance that “your ‘exchange stories’ would be exciting in the first two weeks, after that you’re just a new brat bragging on things, demeaning the life they’ve had while you were gone.” I had my expectations of my post-exchange year. People around me had their expectations too, and I was ready to meet mine and theirs. I made everything and make sure that things are noticeable. I sometime look back and see myself trying to continuously climb a platform of some sort.

The second year abroad was a new level of readjustment. I left knowing the tangible skills I wanted to gain and achieve when I arrived home the following year. (In comparison, as a high school student all I wanted were excitements in any kind.) The year was not easy because I was pursuing a higher education and I hadn’t sat in class for six years, then. But I came back prepared. I knew I wanted to not go back to my previous employer as much as I love them and the work they do. I knew I would be in a limbo for a while if my surviving plans doesn’t work. But on top of everything, I knew people had expectations for me and I’m ready to fail them. My expectations were for simply for myself to learn how to fail and get back up. I would disagree if you say that I set my expectations low so I wouldn’t be too disappointed, because for me, failing and rising back again is as high as it can gets.

The two months being abroad this year was nowhere near to the immersion the two previous experiences had to offer. It was a simple trip with my parents to meet my sister whom I haven’t met for more than five years, with the nephew and brother-in-law whom I only talk via Skype to, with the little niece that was planned to join the crowd. Rather than going intercultural, it took me instead into my intra-cultural well-being with my family; one that I’ve left in silence for too many times. I was frightened more than going to a new culture. There’s a sense of familiarity and alienation of family and closeness that I had never immersed myself in before. I did have three weeks in between my stay to visit people from my past year(s) abroad, went to cities and barge into quaint bookstores and museums but that wasn’t even the highlight of my trip. My best moments went un-captured because they were early morning before my eyes were ready to open, or in a cold spring day when I just refuse to have shower.

Readjusting back was something else. It was not an exchange year, and it was hardly an intercultural experience by most standards. I didn’t even put my life in Jakarta to a stop. (I was still taking translation works and supervising Seumpama’s website development). It was a mere pause that I needed personally but (I thought to be) quite harmful for any work-related endeavours. So coming back home this time had no precedence. I started readjusting rather quietly. The house is quiet and I like it, I can hear myself better. It’s bare, but everything I need is there, I just need to find them and set it back up again so I can resume with life. And, I started resuming this past week. I had the whole week off and was immersing myself in the bareness of space, learning to find the matter of the things that matters. The table I put at the beginning of the story is one of the things that I need to set up so I can do my work; it’s a mere space. Yet it’s also a corner of my refuge where I’d sit for a couple of minutes to feel the sun hits the curtain, which cause its warm shade to fall on my fingers. I could do with only the former, but the latter makes moments. It’s the time that gives meaning to the space, and create what matters to one’s being.