The Sun is Not Always Shining

Today is my 40th day in Russia, a number in which I'm sure I could find all sorts of significance if I went looking for it, and I could make tons of analogies if I wanted to.  But I don't think I will.  Right now, 40 is just a number, and my current preoccupation with it is trying to determine if it is a high or low number.  That is, when do I stop considering myself 'new'?  Adjustment times vary hugely, and this is proving to be a long one, likely because so many things are changing at once.  I think everyone of my friends upon graduation and entering into 'the real world' had to go through an adjustment: how to make friends, how to structure your time, how to make sure you are eating enough... I decided to take this situation and add to it the added bonus of needing to relearn small cultural norms, and learning how to talk all over again.  I feel very young here.  Not young in the sense that the world is ever before me and the doors never stop opening.  I mean young in the sense of being naive, immature, helpless, and unable to understand.  It is frustrating, and I think a lot of my impatience with my language improvement is akin to the desire to just grow up already.  I never though I would wish ever wish to be older than I am, but I do.  I keep being reminded of St. Paul encouraging Timothy in his ministry, "Don't let anyone look down on you because you are young."  It is hard not to feel ridiculous as a bright eyed bushy tailed squirrel (which I haven't seen here btw) straight out of college with no real qualifications whatsoever, trying to convince professors, PhD's and retirees that they should take me as an authority for at least an hour each day.  Even out of class I often feel like a baby, needing help for even small things, and trading opinions with people who have had 10 more years than I have to test theirs.  So, maybe it is the cold weather that has finally struck, the ever decreasing amount of daylight, or the cold I was battling all weekend, but I am tired of adjusting.  I am tired of being 'new'.  I want all of the work of learning to live by myself, finding good friends, and putting all of the parts of my life together to build the whole, I want this all behind me.  I want to feel comfortable to join in conversations instead of just listening to them.  I want to not have people translating things for me all the time (and I want to not need them to!)  In short, I think I am asking for everything that it took me 4 years to build in New Haven, and I am looking for it now after 40 days.  Patience has never been my strong point.  It takes time to build friends out of acquaintances, a home out of an apartment, and a life out of a routine, and sometimes it takes longer than others.  I do consider myself lucky that everywhere I have lived in my life I was able to find all of these three things.  Some people go years trying to make them.

One of my biggest struggles here has been letting people do things for me.  Letting people buy/give me presents, letting people know if I need something, letting people help me.  I have always been jealous of my independence and self-reliance.  It is something that if I'm honest, I am often quite proud about.  A lot of it is tied up with my pride in being a woman.  Nothing irks me quite so much as having someone tell me not to worry about something and just ask a man to do it later.  Women shouldn't hold themselves to lesser standards than the men in their lives!  So, you can maybe see that needing to ask for help for everything here has been a struggle.  Even sometimes painful.  But really, quite a good thing because it is humbling.  And the attitude towards self-reliance in general is different here.  I remember in high school during my junior year, I took a class that looked at events of American History through the lenses of literature, philosophy and art, and I remember being occupied at length with the impact of western expansion on the American mindset.  This idea of settlers heading out on their own, needing to be completely self-relient because that was their only hope of survival.  This value is so deeply embedded in us as a nation.  The "Mr. Fix-It" is esteemed (though "Mrs. Fix-It" is still working on it) and every mother seems to want her child to be the next truly renaissance man.  I mentioned this in one of my last posts, but community here is much more important.  And, as such, you should not spurn the community's offers to help you.  That would be [oops, has been] highly offensive.  After spending all weekend in my apartment with a cold, satisfied for food, warmth, and medicine, I had at least 3 people "remind" me that I really should have asked them for help with what I needed.  I'm thinking I may need to start brainstorming more possible "needs."  It is hard to just accept people being kind to me without moving on to try to figure out how I will repay them.  It is like voluntarily living in debt, but doing so because you are trusting them not to hold it over you.  It makes me sad to realize how much difficulty I am having with this.

So, flowers aren't always blooming here, it is often cloudy or raining, but the sun is more beautiful when you haven't seen it in a while, and I think I am due to be seeing it pretty soon.  After all, the sun came out on the 40th day ;-)