my city

I am only just coming to realize that, whether or not i actually liked living there at the time, Barcelona is My City, and Castelldefels My Town. I generally live as if Spain had never happened, nor Austria nor Germany either. I just paste together those portions of my life when I was in the states, or take out the international aspect of my other memories. So, what does my life consist of? The first four years of my life, the second half of the second grade and the first half of the third, one year in middle school, one year in high school, and college up to the present. Everything else is... murky.

It's not that I intentionally leave everywhere else out of the picture- it's just that... well, for one thing, mentioning living in Other Countries, no matter how subtly it is slipped into conversation, immediately takes over, and then you have to make disclaimers and calm people down, and explain that it's just your life, not some amazing privilege or fairy tale. For another thing, if I think too hard about what it was like to live not in the States, I can't function properly. It throws everything into confusion. Memory puts on it's famed rose-colored glasses, and I start to think "I really liked it better there." But then I remember how often I was really unhappy, in a way that has never beset me here, and I think, well, this must be better. And then I have to go into wondering whether it really IS better, and what parts I'd like to keep from each, if I could, and wonder how valid my experiences there WERE, after all, and whether it's not arrogant of me to think I know so much more than other people because I've lived Somewhere Else.

And things just spiral downward from there. So, for those reasons, I keep them separate- this life and that. As best I can manage, they don't mix. But of course, I can't erase my past just by hiding it. So occasionally it will come through. Lately, it has been doing so in a more positive light. Examples: Yesterday I was able to help my friend with her Spanish homework without any trouble. I even knew the grammar and the terms, which I never knew when trying to help my Spanish friends with their English work. And I saw pictures of an event at my parent's church in Spain, and couldn't stop oohing and aahing over the people, and the places, and how they haven't changed but have, and saying inane things like "yep, that's my church!". And then today I saw pictures that a friend's bf posted from his trip to BCN, and to my extreme surprise couldn't help exclaiming in utter happiness "Aww! That's my city!!"


I realize that all these musings just sound exactly like other people with multicultural experiences in their childhood. Sorry if you were bored by it. But to me, this is poignant. How am I supposed to integrate where and who I was with where and who I am becoming, now? What do those experiences mean? What on earth am I supposed to do with the immense turmoil they create within me? Is it ok not to shy away from mentioning that I grew up outside the US? Am I entitled to look at the US culture from outside it? Or is that possibility precluded me because I'm not fully participant in the Spanish culture either?
Ack. See, this is why I don't think about stuff like this on a regular basis.
signed, a burgeoning ATCK.
over 'n out.
E.O.