Friday 27 November 2015

Are you depaysee.

Are you 'depaysee' ? Is that why you feel out of sorts ? 
Having been raised in another country, is this country and its people, alien to you ?
It's quite unfathomable, the sense of feeling at home, of instinctively recognising ones Ain Folk and its often missing when one decants to another country since the norms and the traditions are not 'your' norms and traditions. Your fluency is for something different, not very different but sufficiently so that your surrounding, which seems to fit so many of your friends, but jars your own sensibility.  
Without knowing why you are, or have become, more susceptible, more questioning, more disadvantaged, you lack the fluency to negotiate. It's not what the locals say but what they don't say, that hidden language of innuendo which is missing from your vocabulary. 
You can't go back since the place you came from is changed beyond description, as are yourself The only way is forward learning new skills and new coping methods, to be amongst the natives of whom you will never be one. 
In some ways it's worse for me since having returned. I fit in even less and yet there is part of me expecting to know and understand as if it were part of me a sort of second nature. 
Why are the English (Welsh) so oblique so opaque, so not what they purport to be.
"Perfidious Albion" springs to mind. Are they any different from any other nationality in this way or is it a common failing in mankind in general.


Why do I always seem to be peering in, from outside, always adjusting my language to fit their parochial standpoint. Why do they seem so transparent, so lacking in guile.

Added to this is the sense of responsibility which women carry around with them. 
Men feel a responsibility to provide the material things and women the emotional things. The material are finite, the emotional infinite and so a woman's work is never done. 
A man makes it into the chair and he's home, a women transfers her concern to the next close object she cares for and begins to worry about their state of being. 
Perhaps it's a females vulnerability which makes her alive to her surroundings. A man can feel the confidence his masculinity brings and the protection it affords him, a woman always has to negotiate her space and security and is therefor more attuned to her surroundings. In this process of being attuned she sees the plight of others as a 'real time' experience not an academic process of which tomorrow is early enough.

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