Saba Imtiaz: Everyday is a winding road..

It feels strange, these days. Sometimes I wonder if im losing my mind, or am just too tired by the time , but everywere I look around I feel like I am seeing scenes from home. I thought the TV screen in a coffeeshop was showing a Pakistani TV channel, and I often see people who look vaguely familiar, except they’re not at all.

In the past few months, I have become acutely aware of behavioral system clashes – I realize so many of the behaviors I sought to adhere to at home clash with how people act and behave here. This is purely related to AIESEC, because culturally I find other differences, of a more pleasant kind. But the acute feeling of homesickness, (that I think I am proud of feeling, simply because it tells me of what are the things I valued and miss, as opposed to when I lived at home, and so many things were what I took for granted). But the feeling of being lost in translation, of having blank looks and stares on either sides, of people just not understanding that this (the introverted, quiet person) is who I really am, and I am not uncaring, its because I find the seemingly required change process, against what I believe in and stand for.

This is not meant to be a reflection on all the people I have met and worked with in this country, for even in the madding crowds, I have met people who simultaneously keep up a constant flow of bilingual translation and make an effort at empathy.

I speak to three of my closest friends almost everyday, and between our common sighs, crazy plans for the future and an understanding that we are trying to come to terms with our past and our present and our future, I realize that to me, it is truly love, friendship and all the sappy annotations personified when I know that despite them being tired, overworked, exhausted, battling different timezones, expensive text messaging rates and faulty internet connections, I can always reach out and chatter on. And despite the fact that sometimes it is very, very hard for me to explain what it really is that is going through my head, or for me to understand stories in fragments, it has kept me going, helped me smile, and helped me breathe when I wanted to panic and board a plane going anywhere.

Here's to our collective pasts, presents and futures. My coffee cup brimmeth over.

Questions about my personal life have begun to scare me. I don't have time to think about this, I don't have time to think about this, goes the refrain in my head - and when I am confronted with questions that force me to think my head goes blank. You know, like that moment in a Calculus exam when nothing makes sense, and you wish you were anywhere, anywhere but here?

Someone asked me a few days ago how I still felt an identity crisis everytime I leave and arrive back to Jordan. I have no idea why, but the question of the nomadic existence has popped up in conversations recently, and despite the fact that I haven't been as much of a nomad as some of my other friends, the thought of even seeing the inside of an airport is giving me hives. Going from airport to airport, filled with a sense of trepidation or excitement, replete with a soundtrack to match, playing on repeat in my head and on my mp3 player - I am living this much-coveted dream finally, instead of wondering about it (because now, when I see people saying that they want to travel the world, I wonder whether they know how much it can emotionally make or break you?)

I haven't written anything meaningful in a while, and I have an entire folder full of thoughts and emotions from everything I felt when I first arrived. Is this writer's block or just the fact that familiarity has now transcended everything? The conflicting feelings of wanting to stay and wanting to move on are blending into nothingness. I have to be awake in 5 hours and all I want to do is to wake someone up so I can talk to them, or wish I had asked someone to stay awake so I could talk. Except these days, I rarely make any sense at all.

Oh well. As always, GetFuzzy says it best: