"The Same Elephant" A quest for perspective.

Click “Archive” to read back through earlier posts during the 3 months I spent backpacking India and Nepal in the Fall of 2010.

I think my moods are directly linked to the weather. When it is rainy or overcast in this grey city, my heart feels heavy and alone. But when the sun breaks through, it reveals small patches of landscaped trees and buds and beauty I never noticed through all the polluted haze. The world turns green and yellow and blue and I catch myself practically running through the streets on my way to work, as if the sun’s rays are pumping the life back into my veins.

This is my experience in Washington, D.C. This semester I am the Operations and Internship Program Assistant of a Senegalese non-profit that specializes in community-led development in sub-Saharan Africa. I wake at 5:30 every morning and get home at 7:30 every night. I process incoming internship applications for the summer term, conduct office inventory, and am about to start a project archiving articles about our organization through the years.

This particular morning, the sunshine has lit my heart on fire. I run out of Arnold and Porter, where my uncle works, and onto F Street, hurtling down the escalator and into the sulfur-scented cave of train tracks. The Metro stations are coated in an eerie shroud of mechanical stillness, though most people are moving as fast as their expensive shoes can maneuver them away from each other.

The sun seeps in through the concrete. It hovers like an invisible friend on my shoulder as I wind through my morning routine. Red line. The doors open lazily, bing bing, slide shut. Commuters invent creative new ways of avoiding eye contact with each other, so deep is their desperation to keep to themselves. Farragut West. Dupont Circle, Q Street. The neon message orders me to Please touch SmartTrip card again. For once, all three escalators are operating. Steep ascent back into wind, light, air.

Above the cave, the air is sharp and fresh. The newspaper man shouting “Street Sense!” looks like he doesn’t sleep, or shave, or have any other life outside those two words. The glowing “WALK” signs pave my way past rumbling rows of impatient engines. All is beautiful.This morning, I try to reconnect with the mindset I held in Nepal and India. I feel parts of it coming back to me like a forgotten dream, seeping up from the place in my memory where I stashed it until I regained the emotional strength to process my experiences and move forward. As I so often did in India, I find myself consciously trying to feel each of my emotions, understand them, detach from them, and release them into the breeze. I am light as the air today.

On Connecticut Ave, two clean-up crewmen sweep up a pool of broken black glass that was once the storefront window of the kind of clothing boutique where a tank top costs over $80. The window is now a puddle, dark and crunchy like rock candy.

Maybe not everyone’s day is going as sweetly as mine. And maybe joy isn’t just about the weather, but how you perceive it.

This story begins in the summer of 2010, ten pages back. To start from the beginning. scroll to the bottom of this page and click back through the months. 

Quick update on my life, as I have stopped posting regular blogs and stopped writing in general:

Yesterday was Christmas, which was nice but strange without my sister, who is coming home tomorrow from a semester in France, though the incoming blizzard may pose a problem.

I got my first choice internship in Washington, D.C. for the spring semester. I will be the Operations Assistant for the DC branch of Tostan, an organization based in Senegal that works in nine African countries to promote community building and problem solving at the local level instead of dictating change from the top down. I start the last day in January and will be living with my aunt and uncle in McLean, Virginia. This semester will not only be a good chance for me to adapt to the city before attending GWU next fall, but also an opportunity to sort through some of my mental mush leftover from the trip that I still haven’t had much time to figure out since getting home. I will hopefully have time to start either yoga or meditation and read a mountain of books piling up in my room.

Also, I’m going to spend more time focusing on the work with the kids of ECDC— I have a tri-fold poster board to make a display about the kids to use in presentations, and I’m going to make a scrapbook of the butterflies using the materials my friend Danielle gave me for my birthday. I’ll keep trying to find the easiest way to make donations, though as of right now the best thing is for people to give me donation money or checks and I’ll wire it through my bank, paying the service fee out of my own pocket. I’m going to send a big package of clothing and books to the kids, as well as some Christmas presents and anything people want to add to the pile. 

Tomorrow I’m going to speak at the Kiwanis meeting, and last week I visited the English classes at my high school and spoke once more about my trip. I talked with my journalism teacher, Mr. Graziano, who advised me about the steps to take if I want to turn this blog into some sort of published book, which everyone is encouraging me to do. As of right now, I think I would start the book with my very first post and end it with the post “There Goes My Life” from the airplane ride home. As I have said, since I got home writing has become nearly impossible or it involves too many people to post about so publicly. 

I also wrote a piece for the Concord Monitor about my trip which focuses mostly on the time I spent with the kids, and I sent it in an e-mail this morning. 

Life is on track and back to normal, though I still feel as though I have just piled Band-Aids onto something so unbearable to remember yet so impossible to forget. In time, I will find ways to come to terms with all I saw, felt, and realized, though that may take years, leaving me hanging in limbo until I am able to sort out my thoughts and make sense of the complexities of the world that I have now witnessed firsthand.

Until that time, I will continue leading a very normal life, sprinkling stories and advice to friends who ask, but otherwise going about my days as always have— cramming too much into my schedule, procrastinating, staying up late, skipping breakfast, running around trying to catch something that exists only in my mind. 

Quick Note- Please hold off on making online donations to ECDC for the next week as the finer details are still being arranged. Sorry about the constantly changing information.

Life is beautiful. I have officially learned to separate myself from my own negative emotions. It’s not that I don’t have bad days or bad moods, but I choose them. I make the choice to let negativity eek into my interactions when I am simply in the mood for self-pity, but I am also able to separate from that and say, Today is going to be a good day because I say so. That’s what I did today. And I smiled so brightly through a 9-hour shift at my new retail job that I was nearly laughing out loud.

Another reason for my seemingly random elation is the fact that efforts for supporting the children at ECDC are falling into place. For anyone who was brave enough to wade through my miserable posts while I was in India, you know how much anxiety and depression I felt when facing the problem of how to get donation money to the kids I care so much about, and how to make any significant difference beyond my own financial limitations. 

But, it seems, most of these issues are in the process of being resolved. Kari and Pushpa, and probably several others who I don’t know about, have been working tirelessly in Kathmandu to establish a way of donating online from the States. They set up PayWay on ECDC’s website, http://www.ecdc.org.np/, which seemed at first like it would be the answer to my very whiny prayers for an easy way out of this money mess. My mom tried to make a $100 donation yesterday morning, but the website required a Nepali phone number, rejected her proposed new password for a PayWay account, and required that donation amounts be submitted in Nepali rupees (USD x 74). So, again, we seemed to be back at square one. And by now, I have several donations of over $100 waiting to go to the kids (Not that I’m complaining—Enormous thanks to all who have contributed so far.)

I got a message from Kari today saying they were trying something else, called Growing Beyond Bars, which uses PayPal without all the frustrating fees. It seems like this one is going to work, but we’ll find out when Mom tries to make her own donation. 

I urge anyone who has been touched by the stories and photographs and videos of these children, who have become so dear to my heart, to donate anything they are able to through this site. Please feel free to e-mail me with questions, and I’ll do my best to answer them though I am still in the learning stage myself. To donate, follow the link to http://www.growingbeyondbars.org/. Your money will be in good hands, and you can rest assured it will benefit the little ones directly.

To make matters even better than they already are, my friend Danielle and I are going to box up some of her old t-shirts to send to ECDC (Early Childhood Development Center, P.O. Box 2108, Kathmandu, Nepal— and if you are able to send any clothing, children’s books, or shoes, please mark the outside of the box declaring “Children’s Clothing” for customs reasons). My former history teacher, Mr. Denslow, is also packing up his children’s old clothes and books to send over. And to top it off, Laxmi Tamang, the brilliant 12-year-old girl from the residential home, has officially gotten her own e-mail address and will be pen-paling with Denslow’s 10-year-old daughter, Lily. 

All of this success has prompted me to start thinking seriously about a long-term commitment to raising money and awareness for the children back in Kathmandu. Today at Target, I bought a trifold board to create a visual display of photos and information on ECDC to use when giving presentation about the kids, which I will hopefully have opportunities to do in the next few years. I also bought a binder/clip board to start organizing and planning a vague idea, tentatively called “Babies Behind Bars,” as an informal club/student organization that my friends could bring back to their universities after Christmas break and gather a group of their own friends to do fundraisers and benefits for the children. I’ve started making a photo slideshow for YouTube of the kids and I’m going to make a digital feature about the issue for the potential donors to hear more information.

As if this is not enough blessing for one life, the person I love is arriving at 9 AM tomorrow at the Manchester airport after surviving Spain, Morocco, Ghana, South Africa, Mauritius, India, Singapore, Vietnam, China, Japan, Hawaii and San Diego.

There is so much love in my heart that I think I might explode.

Today I spoke to five classes of freshmen at my high school about my experiences in India and Nepal. Many of the kids, to my surprise, wanted to talk to me after class and showed a lot of interest in my trip. To be honest, I expected most of them to sleep or talk through my presentation, but there was very little of that. I handed out my “business cards” to the kids and hopefully they will contact me to bounce around ideas about trips or plans of their own.

I sat in the classroom with my teachers for almost an hour after the students went home. We talked about our culture, human nature, how much we take for granted, how different societies can be. I explained how hard it’s been trying to talk to other people about my trip- the automatic reaction of my friends is to try and relate to me as they always have. I explain how I feel about being home or my experiences, and they immediately respond with, “Oh I know! That’s how I felt when…”

And I know they are trying to keep things the same, trying to be there for me and tell me that they understand what I’m going through. But another part of my mind is shaking its head, saying “This is different.” Which it is. But if I never let anyone relate to or understand me, that keeps me awfully isolated.

As I was driving home from Pembroke Academy, after picking up speaker wires at Best Buy, I developed one of my piercing headaches. I squinted against the light glinting off the sides of cars and  squeezed my eyes closed at every stop light. I got home with some difficulty and collapsed on my bed upstairs. I curled in a ball and slept through the entire afternoon.

Five hours later, I woke for dinner. Mom and I spent the evening in the living room with our new glowing Christmas tree. She finally set up the stereo system and Celine Dion’s Christmas CD played through the rest of the night. I mended my ripped jeans on the couch, patching holes with a pieces of fabric I got in Delhi, lost in thought.

Whenever I spend a lot of time talking about my trip, my experiences, and especially when I talk about the kids, I get these headaches, I sleep, I shut off and withdraw as far from both worlds, the one I left and the one I’m in, as possible. I can’t deal with all of this.

Since I’ve been home, writing has been a painful chore. I eek out a few declarative sentences into my journal and roll over to sleep. The most frustrating part is that I can’t express my own feelings the way I have been able to so easily for the past three months. I am not experiencing life with new eyes like I was abroad, so it’s much more difficult to analyze my own reactions and emotions because they are so commonplace and utterly normal.

I have figured out a few pieces of my own emotional puzzle, though. First of all, I’ve felt a strong sense of detachment since coming home. I am enjoying being back and the luxuries in my life, but I am watching everything happen around me with a glazed-over expression. I’m withdrawn and overwhelmed.

I also feel immensely thankful and blessed. I don’t get angry or frustrated nearly as much as I used to, and I don’t let small things seem massive. This probably stems from my detachment and passivity, but it also tells me that I am appreciating my life and my privilege more than I ever have before. This week, my dog crapped all over my room, threw up on the carpet, and salad dressing spilled into my purse. But none of it actually bothered me for more than a few minutes. Instead, I would think, “That could have been so much worse.” If those things had happened last year, it would have determined my mood for an entire week, causing a domino effect and passing negativity into the rest of my interactions and actions.

Also, worst of all, I feel an enormous load of guilt anytime I eat a meal or turn on the hot water. I look at everything I have and, though I’m grateful for all of this, I feel like I don’t deserve it. I feel like a crook who will be caught any second using a lifetime of prosperity that I have done nothing to earn. Everyone says not to feel this way, to appreciate all of it. But I do. It’s possible to appreciate your life and, at the same time, acknowledge that you actually don’t deserve any of it. 

Mostly, I feel what I like to call the Russell Crowe phenomenon. In the movie “A Beautiful Mind,” when Russell Crowe’s character is trying to figure out a complicated, intricate problem in his mind, we hear his voice muttering quickly in his head as he scratches out calculations with chalk on the windows. That’s how my mind is constantly running- high speed mumbling, trying desperately to decipher this equation, trying to make sense of something so over my head that I can’t even figure out what the question is.

Maybe there is no question. Maybe it’s exactly as it appears- two different cultures, two different worlds, and I am just carrying the burden of knowing what else exists out there. But maybe there is more to this. Perhaps there are lessons to learn, ironies, similarities, contrasts, things we can take from seeing how the other half lives, a world of introspection and analysis and different ways of seeing things to try and draw complex conclusions about what I’ve seen and done.

But for now, I can’t take it. I don’t understand it. I feel as though I am drowning in mental paperwork. One thing I have realized about our society is how much social and internal noise exists, keeping me from hearing and understanding my own thoughts without all these external influences- the media, my friends, teachers, family, advertising, and the culture itself.

Everything is pushing and pulling me in different directions, commenting, judging, evaluating my worth as a person from every angle. It’s how we operate as a society. But it distances me from the fragile relationship with my own self that I spent the past few months creating and understanding. Because our culture doesn’t give us enough space or time to actually hear our own thoughts, listen to our own minds. We are dictated what to think, what to wear, how to speak, how to act. How can we ever learn who we are in a place that is always trying to tell us the answer? And how can I maintain who I’ve become in the face of so many outside influences and internal doubts? I don’t know the answers. So I am going to curl back up and go to sleep.

Ever since I got home, I have been entirely unable to write. I feel as though I am pushing my life to the back of my mind because I can’t handle what I will find if I open the box inside my memory. I will give a brief summary of events for the sake of consistency.

We spent Thanksgiving with my best friend Kara and her family. They were wonderful to us. On Friday, some of my friends from St. Paul’s met up in Keene for a reunion, which was also great. I keep telling myself I’m unhappy here, but the people I am blessed with are so unbelievably kind and funny. Nick is right; I have the tendency to take a good situation and try to turn it into a bad one, though I deserve to be happy. 

The more complex version of this synopsis is that I feel entirely numb inside my heart, like I want nothing more than to forget everything as fast as I can because I don’t know how to let myself feel it. I fear I am suffering from a very broken heart- broken for the generation I cannot save. I heard a song by the Indigo Girls today that starts, “Back in the long stretch of loneliness that I’ve come to call a living.” Maybe that is where I have ended up, in the state of isolated loneliness that so many people here have accepted and adapted to. Giving love to other people makes me happy, but here, though everyone is so excited to see me, our friendships fall right back into the old ways. I don’t know how to fit all the extra love in my heart into these old relationship dynamics. On the surface, I look and act the same, so people assume that I am. But I’m not, not at all. At all of these gatherings, I spend most of the night staring into space, trying to locate myself on a mental map, unable to find where I am. My soul is scrambled eggs.

Tomorrow is my 19th birthday.

I can’t sleep on the plane. My entire head has become stuffed thick with congestion and I’m too cramped to find any comfort. I doze in the morning—the flight attendants keep popping up with food and drinks. My last Indian meal (Pizza Hut doesn’t exactly count) is a plastic tray of rice, curry, and paneer cubes.

I’m starting to think about all the things in this country and on this trip that I am going to miss and wondering if I was too quick to assume that home will still feel like home. In Dehradun, I was nearly incapacitated by the unbearable guilt of my own privileged life—how will I be able to live with myself when that guilt is a constant companion everywhere I go?

I watch most of the movie “Gran Torino” and spend the rest of the plane ride trying to get to sleep. My eye is still bloodshot and dripping from the smog and my sudden onset of a cold. My whole body is aching with fatigue.

The flight attendants have become increasingly hostile as time goes by. They are shouting at passengers in a display of unprofessionalism I’ve never seen before.  My mom didn’t hear the stewardess ask “Veg or egg?” for breakfast and she replied, “Are you talking to me?” The woman bent down an inch from my mom’s face and snarled, “Egg. Or. Veg-i-tar-i-an?” The passenger next to me is going to complain.

The plane lurches and shakes as it descends to Newark airport.  We touch down at 5 AM local time, having left Mumbai at midnight. We traveled for 15 hours and only gained 5.

The air in the hallway into the airport is so cold and smells like Christmas. I step onto the ramp and throw my arms up in victory at the huge American flag hanging against the wall. I am home.

After seeing the behavior of the flight attendants, I am worried that I will find Americans to be much less friendly than I remembered. But every person I meet in the airport is unbelievably kind and helpful. They act like we have known each other all our lives.

We pass a large painting of the Statue of Liberty and come into the first bag checkpoint. A tall black man greets us to take our luggage. He beams when he sees us approaching and cries, “Oh, I been waiting for you a long time!” I want to throw my arms around him. “I HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR YOU ALL MY LIFE!” I call back.

Everyone treats us with so much respect and politeness. It’s as if they know what I have gone through to get to this moment. One man bumps my bag and says, “Oh, I’m sorry.” I might cry. Did he just run into me…and apologize for it? Another man says, “After you,” as we’re getting out of the shuttle. I can’t handle this!

“Mom, I am in the Promised Land,” I gasp. “This is my Mecca.”

We go through another security check—they don’t gender-segregate the lines or pull me behind a curtain to feel me up! We pass a Starbucks and I think I might faint. It smells like every good memory of my entire life.

The smell brings me back to snowy afternoons at Borders or curled in front of the fireplace in my old house. It reminds me of the snowy morning I picked Nick up at the airport last Christmas. We got peppermint Starbucks drinks while waiting for my sister’s flight to come in. I remember my happiness in that moment so vividly it’s like I’m inside the memory itself. I can even remember what I was wearing.  

I gape at all the friendly, diverse faces, their clothes, the accents over the PA system. I am frozen, like I was on the first night in Mumbai, but this time I’m frozen with such overpowering reverence and joy and love for every single person here.

When we find the gate for our flight to Manchester, I put my bags down and scramble to find my cell phone and SIM card. I dig through my bag frantically, and when I finally find the plastic bag with the card, my hands are shaking so bad that I drop it and have to search on hands and knees for five minutes to find where it fell. I finally get my phone together and send texts to Nick and Kara. Kara is still picking us up at 9 AM and we have a brief back-and-forth with lots of exclamation points and capital letters.

I walk to a newsstand (there are no coffee shops in the gate…I couldn’t deal with that right now anyways) and I get cranberry juice and a roll of cough drops. When I take a sip from my drink, I hold it around the top and balance it against my chin like I have for months to keep the rim from touching my mouth. Then I laugh out loud at my mistake and drink straight from the bottle—God bless America.

As we board the plane, I am whimpering with excitement the same way my dog Sammy squealed when we left him at a kennel for a week and then picked him up—he moaned with joy the whole car ride home.

The flight to Manchester is short. My mom keeps repeating, “We’re almost home!” as I stare out the window at the clouds below. I’m overwhelmed by everything I’m feeling right now. I’m full of excitement and joy, but I fear that home won’t be everything I expected, that people won’t be able to understand me anymore, and I can’t stop thinking of the kids back in Kathmandu.

The girl in the seat next to us starts vomiting on the descent into Manchester airport so we focus all our attention at the scene out the window—sprawling light brown fields, grain silos, and oceans of trees. This is my home, always has been. Why am I suddenly feeling like a balloon leaking air?

We step off the plane into a chilly New Hampshire morning. I have more memories in this airport than I can remember—returning from all the family vacations, coming home from a week in D.C. at a leadership conference to find Nick with two roses in the arrivals gate, slumping over coffee and McDonalds while waiting for flights to North Carolina and Washington and California. Yet in all those memories, the emotion I felt stepping off the plane and into the airport was something completely different than what I am feeling right now, and I can’t put my finger on what that is.

We get our bags in the baggage claim stuck at the end of the airport instead of coming out where we always do in the center of the building, where Kara was waiting for us. I text her to let her know and drop all my bags by the belt to wait.

I can hear the screams from the other end of the airport. Three figures are tearing down the hallway, shrieking and sprinting, dodging around crowds of people. I stand to meet them, laughing, and they all jump on top of me at once. Kara, Becca, and Molly all planned to get us for the past month—they made a huge sign and t-shirts that said “Welcome Home.” We all pig pile together laughing and hugging.

The girls grab my bags and hug my mom, and the five of us head out to Kara’s car, chatting and joking around like we always have. On the surface, nothing has changed. But inside, I am a completely different person, and I don’t know how to convey that. I’m so happy to be back, but something is not right.

We all go back to my house, which looks just as we left it. My sister’s friends stayed at the house while we were gone and left it spotless. My room hasn’t been touched—but it feels cold and alien to me. Are these really my things? Do I really have an entire rack of high heels in my closet? I hate high heels. Why do I have so many pairs of shoes? I only wear shoes when I am forced. I hate shoes. Why do I have every style of shirt and pants when I hardly wear half of this stuff and each thing probably cost five times what it is worth? I can’t believe how much I have that I don’t need.

I unpack my bags as the girls watch excitedly, asking questions about everything I can’t explain. What was my favorite place? How was the food? Did I get sick? Was I ever in danger? What were the toilets like? And so on. I answer, all the while hating my responses because of their inability to express anything at all.

We order pizza and the conversation jumps around—I talk about my kids in Kathmandu, but I feel like the topic becomes too serious for the mood in the room. We make fun of Becca for losing her voice and ask about her new boyfriend, and ask Kara how college is going so far. Becca and Molly still go to our high school, and they tell me there has been a countdown going at school for the day I will get back. One of my teachers sent me a message telling me one of his classes was talking about where I am and where I’ve been, trying to map my trip like “Where in the World is Carmen San Diego?”

The three of us go to bed at 9:30 because I’m exhausted. We all pile together on the futon downstairs. A deep sadness or sense of loss is creeping through me. I expected myself to be so relieved when I had every modern convenience again at my fingertips—I am reunited with my Mac laptop, I took a bubble bath in our tub with hot water and jets in the side, and I am borrowing my dad’s Prius so Mom can use the other car. And I wish I was as happy as everyone wants me to be. In a way, I am happy. I’m comfortable, I’m thankful for having so much, but I’m so filled with guilt for being able to have anything in the world when there is a whole other world of people who work so hard and have nothing.

There is one photo of Manish and I on my last day with the Butterflies—he kissed me on the cheek, and I turned to kiss him on the cheek at the same time he turned to kiss mine again, and we kissed on accident. Then we both laughed so hard in the exact same way—we each had a little double chin—and as I am walking through this big empty house, all I can picture is the way we looked at each other in that moment.