Culture Shock

I was talking recently with Stacy, my best friend from Iowa State. She’s working and living in London for six weeks and experiencing culture shock for the first time in her life. It made me think about my first time with cultural shock, something that I can vividly remember. It’s nice to share that experience with someone else in the hopes that it helps their situation; I think all of us tend to forget that our thoughts and feelings are similar to most other people. Plus, it not only reminds me how far I have come, but also serves to remind me that this romantic life I am living, does have its own stresses and complications. I forget that sometimes; living abroad, as ‘easy’ as it is for me these days, demands an ever-expanding set of adjustments. It challenges me in the mundane details of daily life; it reduces the scope and availability of operating on autopilot, which can be both exhilarating and exhausting, sometimes simultaneously.

I hopped on a plane at 22 years old to leave North America for the first time in my life. I was completely naïve. I didn’t even know enough to be afraid or even hesitant. I suppose the fear was overshadowed by a strong belief in myself and my ability to adapt, a trait that had only really been tested by leaving home for college. I had lived in the same house my whole childhood, had the same friends since I was five years old, and even in college had a ready made group of friends in my teammates. But for some reason, I thought going to Greece to live alone would be no big deal for me. I think this is called blissful ignorance. Thank god for that. Maybe I was just so excited to keep playing that I refused to think it through.

But more likely, I was just following a path that many of us yearn for: the need to escape from the reality we have constructed so we can find who we really are.

I thought I was rather cultured being from Seattle. After all, people speak lots of different languages in the International District and I sure do like Indian and Vietnamese food. Certainly this counts for something. Stacy, on the other hand, is from small town in Iowa where DesMoines is considered the big city and Chicago might as well be another country. Our pasts could be held up as a contrast to the spectrum of white middle class Americans.

My reasons for going abroad, aside from basketball, probably stemmed from convention; most of my friends in Seattle had studied or traveled abroad as part of the unofficial liberal middle class doctrine. It also came from my sociology education and the curiosity that comes from living in a multicultural city. But there was something else that drove me and I know its the same reason Stacy is in London. Despite never before setting foot outside of America, and after the probably the two most difficult years of her life, she decided to pack up and live abroad alone. She needed to face herself, find herself, challenge who she was and who she was becoming. No matter our backgrounds, no matter our past experiences or lack thereof, maybe this is the urge we all face.

At the time I left, however, I didn't really know that I had a deeper reason for living abroad. I left America thinking I was going to learn about another country. I’ve done that of course but the thing I didn’t realize then that I know so well now is this: Living abroad is far less about learning about a different culture than it is about learning about yourself. America is a diverse place. You can meet people from all over the world, go to cultural festivals, eat ethnic food that is comparable to the fare abroad, and go to neighborhoods where hardly a word of English is spoken or known. That’s not really the point. It’s the immersion that challenges you; it’s the feeling of being stuck with no way out, with no other choice but to continue. You have the sense of only relying on yourself and yet also needing to reach out to strangers for help, finding that common ground of humanity amongst a new group of people. You learn to lose control a bit, to not fear the unknown quite as much and to either just figure things out or to not figure it out and just let it go. It becomes a bit of a Zen existence by necessity.

Stacy and I were discussing the grocery store, the perils and virtues of shopping in foreign aisles. Often times the breaking point of culture shock comes during or immediately after attempting the basic necessities of food shopping. It’s usually something simple like failing to differentiate between butter and margarine that one can get overwhelmed. The anxiety of choosing adequate milk: the fat percentage, the expiration date, the refrigerated or shelf variety, the pasteurized or not, organic or not, cow or goat, that can really send one over the edge. One can easily manifest the culture shock stress onto something completely undeserving.

Of course, one can stress out about silly things in America as well. It’s the proverbial straw on the camels back and its universal. Its not unique to being abroad of course, its just the threshold seems to be lower when you are on your own in a foreign country. It can just be a normal day abroad when all of a sudden your left wondering why the wrong soup in a restaurant has you near tears. In America, I generally have to be PMSing, hungry, tired, thirsty, stuck in traffic, late and mad at someone to be unable to deal with diurnal complications.

But these days, I don’t stress out about the little things usually. Living abroad has, among other things, forced me to let go of control. I think I roll with life a little more. If I guess correctly while buying milk and I don’t get stomach cramps, I buy the same carton next time. If it doesn’t work out, I pour the milk out and buy a different kind. Rigidity has very tangible repercussions when the minutia of life has the potential to be complicated. If I had anxiety about everything that didn’t go my way, I’d cling to very negligible details with overwhelming regularity. I’d miss out on life. I’d miss the magic of spontaneity, of the good and great that comes from mistakes, of the joy from unexpected sources.

This all sounds like a noble pursuit of course. But realistically, it’s hard as hell in the beginning. I couldn’t help reminiscing about my first week in Athens, five years ago. I was feeling so many things; I couldn’t even name my emotions. I was trying to be strong, telling myself to ‘suck it up’, trying to think about how lucky I was, marveling at visiting these places some people only dream or write about: the Parthenon, Acropolis, islands in the Aegean. I was trying to focus on the positive but in reality, I’d never felt so alone in my life.

Culture shock to me was a term, a definition I could rattle off from sociology courses but had no previous personal experience to relate it to. I didn’t know that my brain was overwhelmed from stimuli that I couldn’t place in manageable compartments. It wasn’t an acute stress I could identify, it was insidious and impossible to pin point. Was it the language barrier? Was it the traffic? Was it the different daily interactions? It was the blanket of the unknown. The fact that every tiny expectation I usually had about my day was now different. I was self-conscious in a way I didn’t even know people could be. If a cashier asked me something, it became an embarrassing situation; if I was lost and had to ask directions, I had to open myself up to rejection or failure. I was ‘different’ for one of the few times in my life, an ‘outsider’ where I had usually fit in as much as I wanted to.

I can talk about it now, but then it was just a jumble of feelings and undeveloped thoughts that came spilling out on the phone with my brother. I was blubbering on a pay phone on the street in Athens, listening to him validate all the ways I wasn’t at all unique in my tears. He had lived abroad so I listened when he told me I wasn’t going crazy and took his advice when he told me to watch an American movie.


Now of course, things are different. The cacophony of unexpected stimuli is much more muted, the resistance to the unexpected has diminished, and not fitting in feels rather normal for me now. I’ve just gotten to the place in my life that I realize it’s often not the complications of life that cause us stress and suffering, it’s our reaction to them. I’ve learned the rather basic things in my life that I can control; a nice apartment, cooking, exercise, a comfortable café, time to read and write, phone calls with family and friends. The rest of my life can be messy and unpredictable, and its not a reflection on me nor is it something I can do much about. This attitude, like most things in life, actually works sometimes.