How to Be an American

I’ve been back in the US for eight months. You’d think that’d be enough time to re-acclimate. And, in many ways, I have. I no longer reach out to take money with two hands, Cambodian style. I no longer automatically edge away if someone tries to start a conversation with me on the subway home. I am again used to making small talk and working ridiculous hours because it’s ‘part of the job’ and spending too long in the cereal aisle, overwhelmed by choice.

Reverse culture shock has, throughout my life abroad, manifested itself in different ways. I remember standing in line at immigration one year, on my annual Christmas pilgrimage home, and the airport employee making general chitchat with me. As comforting as it was, it was also completely alien to me. I felt clunky in my responses, slow in the uptake, struggling to follow her lead. This was, unsurprisingly, the result of no one ever chitchatting with me in lines in Ukraine. Not, perhaps, because Ukrainians don’t do that, but most Ukrainians don’t do it with Americans who speak about six words of Ukrainian. When I returned from Cambodia, there were physical impulses I had to rein in. After just eight months, I had gotten used to throwing toilet paper in the trash, never in the toilet, and offering money with a few fingers touching my extended arm. Every once in a while, in a routine, transactional conversation with a stranger back here in the US, I’ll find foreign words for ‘thank you’ sailing through my head, Дякую, Dziękuję, Გმადლობთ.

But it’s July when I realize, I haven’t hung out with any new people. Besides my coworkers, my life has been limited to my family, my now husband, and our long-time friends. Those people who, long ago, became accustomed to the oddities of far-flung life, however privately they might have judged it. That had been enough of a social life for me when I returned to the States, primarily because I was swept up in the logistics of getting married, finding a job, moving. But now, properly settled, with a thirteen month lease and a new last name, I realize it is time to go out there and really reintegrate. And that will require — making some friends.

Even as an extrovert, this idea of making new friends makes me anxious. I blame part of this on the double-edged sword of being a middle child — you hoard interest because you’re terrified it will be lost. Or perhaps it’s a psychological hang-up of being in my late 30s and reading a few too many articles about how hard it is to make friends as an adult. When you live abroad, you’re flung together with people and you’re friends before you’re sure if you really like them or not. This does, of course, back fire sometimes, but it’s rarely boring. Maybe I’m anxious about being married, and that part of what I do egotistically consider my scintillating personality has diminished by being so cozily in love with my husband. If getting married means ‘settling down,’ and ‘settling down’ has always been synonymous (to me, of course, we’re talking about) of a less exciting life, then has that made me… less exciting?

No matter what’s the root cause of this anxiety, the fear is still the same. I’m terrified I’m too boring for others.

In most of the places I’ve lived abroad, I’ve been inherently interesting, as a foreigner. Maybe not always in a positive way, depending on the person’s previous experiences with foreigners, especially Americans, but there is immediately something about you that makes you shiny (brightly or darkly) and unique. Back in the States, you have to work a little harder. I maybe could have hung my star on having lived overseas for so many years. However, I quickly learned that dropping in that you lived abroad leads to questions about where you were, and nothing kills the glowing small talk vibe like launching into the history and fallout of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. For a short while, I thought I’d be a little vague about where I had been — “Eastern Europe, mostly” — that my discreetness might add to my mysterious charm. But no, it turns out people are not so intrigued by my mystery after all.

With nothing to act as my immediate attention-grabber, I’m learning to be satisfied with the slow burn of making friends in America. My first after-work drinks with a coworker, during which we spent mercifully little time on chatting about work. My clearing of the schedule when an acquaintance from ten years ago announces he’s in town and do I want to come hang out with him and his friends? Maybe my husband and I will sign up for a cooking class or a welding class, the only two classes that seem to be available to unathletic adults in Boston.

What do friends have to do with being American (besides the fact that if I don’t make some friends soon I might be ready to up and leave again)? There are plenty of friendless people who are American, after all. Why do I need to put pressure on myself to be both a full-fledged American AND well-liked?

Well, what is a country after all but its people? They make the history, the culture, the ~*vibe*~. They are the black holes and the shining stars of a country. They are its chain reaction, of which I am a link, even if one that’s slightly dangling off on the end. They have always been the best part of my lives abroad, and it should be no different here at home.

But also, after seven years abroad, I want to know how Americans are Americans. Why are we who we are, how did we get that way, where are we going? What do we think about what others think of us? What do I think of us? What do I think of me here, and not there. Perhaps I’ll be able to figure it out in my relationships with others. Perhaps they’ll be able to teach me how to be an American in America.

There is something that has settled since I’ve come back and something else that has become restless. I came back for something, and I’m not sure entirely what it was. And part of me knows that unless I sit with this, examine it, and try to understand it, I will lose out on the gift of returning. And I want to know how am I different, now, because it seems undeniable that I will be, even if in just some small way.

Let’s see how.