Life Lessons Learned

I have been doing a lot of posts on what is physically going on in my life and I wanted to take an opportunity to put up something a bit more thoughtful. Some of the posts I am most proud of are the ones that have been focused on my experience on a more mental level. My entry"Chunky Dunkin: A Fat Girl's Guide to Peace Corps" is about 30 hits away from having had 1,000 reads, which is awesome considering how specific an audience this blog plays to, and it was a combination of physical realities of my service, meshed with my thoughts on them.

That all being said, I want to reflect a bit on some things I have learned about myself while on this Peace Corps journey of mine. Some of these things are going to resonate with some of the volunteers who are reading this, and some are not, but putting them out there will make me more cognizant of these lessons and I think that is a good thing.

Me getting pumped about something
other than cheese (beet hummus)

#1: I have no will power when it comes to certain topics...namely cheese. This may sound like a joke but as I approach the 50lbs loss mark (17lbs to go!) I realize that this is in part because I am a lazy bastard. I eat raw foods for lunch every day not to make a statement, or because it makes me feel like a healthier and wiser consumer, but because I am too lazy to make my own lunch, and in my world there are no instant food options (fast food, processed packaged food, microwave meals... microwaves.) My biggest “win” has been weaning myself from a heavy reliance on carbohydrates, something that I tried to do multiple times while at home but was never able to fully achieve. Want to know how I finally did this? I stopped buying carbs. I eat a pasta or rice based dinner EVERY NIGHT, but that is the only meal in which carbs are present. If I had snack bars in my house, you can be damn sure I would be eating them, so instead of bringing them in and teaching myself a lesson on moderation, I skip the whole deal altogether by just not having them around.

My “lazy” person diet involves me having to work out my flabby will power muscles for approximately 30mins twice a month while I am grocery shopping. This is not difficult, I don’t go shopping hungry, and I don’t go down the sweet aisle. I get to have one candy bar while I am shopping, and other than that the unhealthiest thing that comes home with me is the container of feta cheese that I buy for omelets, and salads. 

This method has very much pointed out to me how much energy I devoted to food while I was home. Eating it, thinking about eating it, thinking about not eating it, worrying about what would happen if I did or did not eat it; hours upon hours a day! Here, I don’t have to freak, if I get hungry enough I have to eat a vegetable or a fruit, or I have to actually prepare something, which my lazyness will often prevent to a certain extent. By the time I get my unmotivated self to cook something, I know I am actually hungry! The lazy diet methods work for me.

Is it a child scribbling on the wall?
NO, its my PC emotional graph!

#2: Not everyone is the same when it comes to things that tick or set them off. Peace Corps is a crazy emotional ride of crazyness, and though at some point you do learn to level out or deal with your emotions, the ups and downs continue to be there, and it makes you get real intimate with yourself real quick. I think
the majority of issues that happen between people who generally care about each other are based around communication. Here is a situation that would not bug me: a volunteer in another village is having a party. The invitations are going out through word of mouth and we get to the week before the party and I have just heard about the event. This situation doesn’t bug me, and in all likelihood I would call this person up, and ask if I could come and if there is anything I could bring. The reason for this is because I like to assume I was not intentionally excluded, this person probably has a lot going on and assumed that the word of mouth tree through the volunteer community would take care of the needed guest list. This situation would bug certain people I work with though, and I could unintentionally offend someone by not taking this into account.

Dan Savage talks a lot about “price of admission” when it comes to relationships; this concept, in a nutshell, is that you are going to have to go out of your way in certain areas in order to keep your relationships healthy, and that if your relationship with that person is worth it, it is something you will gladly pay. Up to this point in my life I have assumed that most people see the world in very similar terms to how I see it. Though this is partially true, and I do think there is more that joins us together than separates us, there are also some very major differences, and that is what makes the world a wonderful, unique place to live in. When you get to a certain point in your relationships with people, you start to become more intimately acquainted with these little quarks, and being able to negotiate those is what continues to move you forward. I need to start being more active in recognizing these bits in other people, clearly seeing my own, and coming to an equilibrium in order to more actively engage in the relationships around me.  

#3: Who I am, and who I want to be, are going to slowly come together in unexpected ways, and I need to make room for those discoveries as they appear. You know that trend on facebook about a year ago; the one where there would be a series of six pictures and they would all have captions like “How my mother sees me”, “How my siblings see me” and “How I really am”? Though these are hilarious, I think the reason behind their comedy is because they ring really true in some cases (like the Peace Corps one below.) If I had to do one for just myself I think it would sound something like this:

Who I want to be: nomadic, adventuresome type, who traipses around the world in order to meet new people and try and make their lives better. I want my facebook profile pictures to include yurts, and me learning traditional Brazilian dances, and smoking a pipe with the native peoples of New Guinea. I want to have stories that start off with lines like “I was cutting my way through a dense jungle rainforest...” I want to tell people about all the gross bugs I have eaten. What I want to be is the love child of Teddy Roosevelt and Mother Teresa.

Who I am right now: a peace corps volunteer (which means a lot of different things; see "Romanticizing Peace Corps") Someone who does not particularly enjoy living out of her backpack but can do so on the occasion, someone who loves meeting new people, but doesn’t not like to have to be “on” 24/7. I don’t like bugs, especially the big ones with scary appendages and though I love getting into the center of things, I sometimes need a little coaxing. I love and miss my American home, and the family that fills it, and going home at this point sounds almost as sweet as having another adventure lined up. 

For those of you still reading, congratulations! You get the prize of me coming home for Christmas again! J I land Dec 23^rd, and take off again Jan 3^rd!

Who I end up being: a person who can’t be pinned down to one thing or another. I want to be someone who values her sense of home and where she came from and uses it as strength to see new places. I want to be filled with stories, and I want to share them with everyone. I want to be able to unpack my backpack at the end of an adventure and have a stationary, solid place to contemplate it. I want to enjoy my favorite pub at home as much as I enjoy a new pub in the back alley of the Ukraine. Ultimately I want to be someone who never “ends” in evolving who she is and how she sees things. Having a place to stop and rest doesn’t mean you ever have to truly stop the life adventure. My home is not my weakness.

The man is riding a freaking moose
...who doesn't want to ride a moose?!?

A lot of this has come through thinking about going home again, and dealing with this weird sense that I have seemed to stumble into that involves me thinking that needing home is somehow weak. At some point I will unpack this a bit further, but I don’t want to dwell on it too much right now now.

#4:You can get an awful lot of education with just a sense of determination, a passion for knowledge and a few hours of internet access a week. Want to know about the Moringa tree? Ask me freaking anything within the realm of applicable uses and I could probably answer it. Would you like me to get into gender identity and politics and the differences between sex and gender? Awesome, I will talk your ear off! I know more about the different parts of old schooner ships than I ever thought I would because last year for National Novel Writing Month I decided to write 50,000 about lesbian pirate queens and I wanted to sound authentic.

Your education does not begin or end with school or university, I know this seems like an obvious one but to people straight out of undergrad it can be a little daunting. I have spent 17 out of 24 years of my life in some form of school or another and when I graduated I felt like I had lost what had become a constant presence in my life. What I had lost was a set of buildings and a specific set of mentors. What I gained was the ability to drive what I educate myself on, and find people around me that already know, or want to learn about the same things that I do.

#5 and this one ties everything together I like to think. You have to learn how to be happy and it’s not always going to make you happy. Things that make me happy that don’t make me happy (work with me on this one):

·        

      Working out

·         Budgeting my living allowance

·         Going to work on days when I don’t feel like leaving the house

·         Religious study

·         Cleaning

·         Practicing music (guitar, ukulele, harmonica, or voice)

·         Cooking an elaborate meal (love cooking, hate getting everything together and cleaning)

These activities are things that ultimately increase my happiness as an individual but are either a.) not fun to do or b.) are difficult to get myself to start/ do. The ease in which I can get myself to work on stuff like this is usually highly depended on my emotional state, and as made clear above that is something that fluctuates with the wind while in Peace Corps. I like to institute certain mental “hacks” when it comes to motivation on my part. 1.) Even if I haven’t started seeing the difference yet, if I am working out, I tend to be more comfortable with my body. An example of this was actually yesterday while hanging out with a few friends. We were at a house of a doctor who was out of town, who also happens to have a pool.

Normally, in order for me to get into any sort of body of water I have to have serious coverage of my thighs. I have been wearing board shorts into the water for the past decade or so, despite the fact that I don’t have the body proportions to make it look athletic, and I really want to wear girly swim suits. Anyway, I forgot my shorts, and the only way to get into the pool was going in, in my skivvies, which a few years ago wouldn’t have been an option, but now it was. My thoughts: screw it, I worked out this morning and also just happened to have shaved my legs, on top of the fact that I had on cute underwear...those two things never happen!!!!

Secondly, the biggest issue I have is often starting things, after which I tend to enjoy them, or at the very least continue until I am finished. I won’t stop a workout in the middle, so all I really need to do is get to the point where I have begun, and the rest will take care of itself. Pep talks will often do the trick when having to get the ball rolling when it comes to the physical things. Getting myself to practice singing is not at all difficult, I put on songs I like, and then just start singing, but it can be a bit more complicated when it comes to picking up my guitar. By combining these two activities, life gets easier. I practice my guitar with songs that I can sing to.  

Lazy diet works, unfortunately lazy happiness does not. I cannot be both lazy and happy, it is not how I’m programmed. Figuring out how I’m programmed is the bulk of what I have been learning here. What works for some, is not going to work for me every time.

At this point I think I am becoming a big unfocused so I’m going to leave it there. I have no doubt that there will be more posts about life lessons learned. Thanks for tuning in!

Claire