Why do I feel in shades of grey?
Exam Counter : 5 down, 9 to go
Okay. I changed the layout a bit. Even though it is copied shamlessly from lj's preset options, I hope it's not as bad as it was.
Notice: depressing post
I feel bad that I haven't kept up this journal, but more than that. That I haven't kept in touch that well with you guys in the states. I worry that I might not even know you anymore-so what am I doing inviting myself back for another summer? More than that actually, somethimes I wonder. living here is so different than living in america, and who am i to say that i should be allowed to hold on to both at once? When I'm in singapore, everyone says i'm from america, a foreigner, but when I'm in america, I know that i haven't lived there for the past five years, and what am i? a foreinger.
That's the thing with visiting in the summer. Don't get me wrong, I love to visit friends. but while you visit friends, you see that so much else in the neighboorhood has changed, of course, while i'm not there. How can I really claim to belong to a place when my last memories of my classmates are fifth-grade graduation. When I went back last summer, they had part-time jobs at the local pool. I feel so obviously different, some creature parachuted in from a dorgotten land, who doesn't dress the same, talk the same, know the same teachers, go to the same schools. That's why I'm scared that coming back will just become more painful. Maybe it's just wallowing in angst for no good reason, maybe exams have messed up my head, but I can't quite shake this feeling. Of guilt maybe? When I'm here, and happy here, I feel guilty that I'm not remembering what I was before. And when I come back, the way I am back "home" is different that in singapore. I feel like I need some grounding or something, something that I could decide was absolutely true, and say "I am a little american girl who loved the outside solid-color t-shirts and reading fantasy books and the color green" or "Let's face it I am a teenager in this urban-urban place which doesn't even have an outside (to speak of) and where the pressure to dress like everyone else is getting to me, and maybe I do wish I could look 'fashionable' like that, even if I don't really, and it'ts only for a day". (i know this doesn't make much sense) Because I feel that whatever I do, anytime I'm 'betraying' something. and not that my friends in singapore are all fashion-conscious, blond prada-toting airheads.....FAR far far from it.
But I feel like if I do want to go out shopping (which is practically the primary activity here, after eating) or something then I'm changing, and losing whatever part of me who was the little girl who tied dasies to the tress down my the creek. And if I dont, if I want to be an anti-(something) who talks and dresses excatly as I would if I were still in America, then I'm ignoring the fact that I was seven then and am sixteen now, and am in a different country (a point which I really should have noticed by now
>So that's the problem. I guess I feel, somehow, like I am still in 5th grade when I come back to the states, or that I should act like I was in fifth grade, because that's my last time I was there. Not that I have, and not that I really want to, not like i suddenly start wishing I was back in CLES or taking MSPAPs...but it seems somehow to be there. a suggesstion. a shadow.
Why do I seem so determined on feeling guilty, when I think about it?... no matter what country I'm in?
And lots of brownie points to habito_n_somnii , for being the most post-giving reader of this blog.