I’ve noticed something has changed. The things I say are not translating to my friends back home. I did wonder if this would happen, if my reality would become so different to my community back home. How would it change my relationships?
I was having my monthly Girls Night by Skype the other week and I was relaying a Conversation I had to have with our new driver. One of my friends interrupted me and said ‘geez Sar’. I stopped and said ‘I know how that must sound to you, let me explain’. Then I built that context up so my friends back home could try to understand the lay of my land.
Last night I was messaging another friend, telling her about a conversation I had with my maid. My friend said ‘come on love, really?’ Again I gave some context but I knew my reality was lost in that exchange over messenger.
I spoke to B-Bug about it and she just looked at me and said ‘you cannot translate. You cannot possibly understand how another’s life is in a completely different culture, unless you live it’.
A conversation here is now so natural between my friends and me, where the meaning of our words are understood based on our context. Yet my friends who I have had in my life for so much longer, who have seen me at my very best and my very worst and all that comes inbetween; my conversation with them has become more guarded, less detailed and sometimes disjointed.
The comments from my friends have startled me, made me question my humanity. I feel lost for a moment, spinning around in a kind of void. My bearings disappear as my mind struggles to figure out where it is and how it is meant to be thinking. This way, or that way.
You see there are such vast cultural differences here you cannot compare to back home. Now one year on I am recognizing how my life gets lost in translation.
I want to share my life as fully as I ever did before, and so the challenge for me is how to create a dialogue we both understand. One that keeps me connected across the ocean to those I hold so dear.
