CULTURE SHOCK MALAISE
A few days ago I stopped writing posts, I stopped doing most everything, and since that time I have been wondering why. And now I am going to try in a few posts, written mainly to myself, to figure out why.
One reason is because I came to a point last weekend where something froze up, when I didn’t feel like doing anything, let alone write posts on WordPress. I didn’t have a desire to write, to talk to people, to eat, to do anything. My condition would best be described as depression, a complete lack of motivation, but a totally unreasonable depression to anyone around me and one I couldn’t explain and certainly didn’t want to blame on anyone else or or the United States for being the United States. But this time I didn’t want to escape this feeling of total malaise. I wanted to face it directly, which I am doing right now.
This has happened to me often when I have come back to the United States from spending time abroad, in fact almost every time, and I have come back in my lifetime at least 50 times from stays overseas. Sometimes I feel this malaise for months or even a year in which I didn’t feel like fitting back into the American way of doing things even when I knew it was demanded of me, I didn’t feel like doing anything. I did of course do the things that I had to do, reluctantly, and no one much noticed, but I felt as if I was acting without feeling or motivation, just doing what I had to do.
Partly this comes from the transition from feeling intensely alive when abroad because travel is so stimulating. Everything is new and different when traveling. Because you don’t know the language and the food is different and people dress differently and you know that you can be acting in ways that offend people, you are very alert. You are very open and responsive and engaged. Sometimes you are totally confused or lost and have to constantly be figuring things our or giving up and just taking things as they are.
Of course, this is the reason that I travel in the first place. I dropped myself into Morocco without knowing the language, the currency, how the transportation system works, where to get something to eat, where to go to the toilet, how to use a squat toilet hole in the ground when I found one, how much anything should cost, how to say hello or thank you or who I should look in the eye. When you don’t know any of these things your mind is going a mile a minute and you are constantly engaged, constantly on edge, constantly making decisions that you without knowing whether they are right or wrong. In Morocco where everything is open to the street you are constantly awash in sounds and bright colors and strange smells and the rush of people around you your senses are all engaged all of the time in a constant total body massage.
The result of this intense engagement can make you anxious and overwhelmed at times, but it also makes you feel intensely alive and fully engaged and responsive.
This is certainly why I travel to India again and again. It is to be bathed in the sensuality of walking down an Indian street in a place like Varanasi, overwhelmed with sensation, not knowing what I am going to encounter next, always concentrating and open to what comes next.
The first few days after returning I am excited by seeing people again and by having the chance to tell my story, although most people, since they haven’t been to Morocco don’t know what to ask and are more interested in telling me what I’ve missed here, which doesn’t sound too exciting to me. But I am still living in the euphoria of Morocco, until last weekend when I suddenly froze up.
This has happened again and again and I should be used to it. But when I walk down my street I see almost no one outside and the strip malls of Asheville seem lifeless to me and the grocery stores ordinary. I have almost no desire to go out of my house. I feel numb and immobilized by American ways of doing things after feeling fully alive in Morocco. That transition is what causes the malaise.
And of course it is very hard to explain to this to anyone who lives here and doesn’t feel this emptiness or malaise at all. It is as if I am moving in a world of black and white and they are moving in a world of color. So I don’t try to explain it.
All I know is that slowly this malaise will lift and I will return to normal. But normal has come, after being flattened for two days, because I begin imagining not being here again. I begin to come to life again as I start planning my next trip aboard, to India and Europe for three months starting in January. Why can‘t I feel normal without going anywhere?
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 