Going off the suggestion of my tutor at ISA, I tried to wrap my mind around how I would have to change my mindset and behaviors if I was going to fully accept Argentine culture. In addition to coping with my apparent struggles in living with Argentina, I was coping with my previous realization of the fact that traveling abroad is not the same as living abroad. Thus it is here that I´d also like to point out that humans are obviously beguiled by foreign cultures and have been for centuries, and it´s obvious as to why this is true. But I still think we romanticize the realities of these differences. I´m not saying this in the sense that I thought Argentina would be perfect, when in reality it´s a disaster--because this is completely false. It´s merely that I always prided myself on wanting to experience new cultures, and here I am in a new culture and I´m seeing my own demise--constantly unsure, confused, frustrated, homesick, self-conscious, lonely and exhausted. Obviously I am happy and have reasons to smile every day, but looking at myself under a microscope, I see cells of stress and they´re eating away at me.
I was still contemplating this at dinner and it was obvious that there was something else on my plate other than rice, some delicious bready/pancake things and salad. Ana asked me what I was thinking about and I told her that I had a serious problem: I don´t know how to relax and that I don´t know how to cope when I´m not perfect. She laughed. Not at me, but because she´d had this problem in the past (and you can still see traces of it in certain things she does, so I understood her laughter). I told her about my struggles with understanding all these forms of subjunctive I´d never seen before (because newsflash Spanish students, it´s not just with emotion, commands with a different subject or in sentences where you´re passing judgment, it´s basically in any statement that´s ambiguous) and how they were manifesting into the realization that I just didn´t have a subjunctive mindset. She told me something along the lines of what my tutor at ISA had told me. I had to open my heart and mind up to the idea that nothing here is perfect, and many things that I wouldn´t have doubt about, there is doubt about, especially in Argentina and Latin America. I can´t be perfect because in the struggle to be perfect, I will miss out on the details that are imperfect. I will fail every day if I try and plan it moment by moment, because in Argentina, things don´t happen perfectly on time, they happen when they think they should or when they feel like it, and the Argentines have to be versatile. She told me about a phrase they have that essentially suggests one has to bend like a malleable wire in order to live the best life, because to be inflexible or unable to do so means you will face even more failure than the already high level of failure and disfunction here. Makes sense. Obviously, I have to think about the future in general terms and make plans (like my trip for Mendoza!) but other than that, you have to live in the moment occurring right now and live in it consciously. She kept telling me to just relax and calm down and sometimes I get more hysterical when people tell me to do this, but it was some of the best advice I´ve ever gotten because I was willing to trust an Argentine with perfectionist tendencies on how to deal with trying to be perfect in Argentina.
Maybe I´m making myself sound like a crazy headcase, but I think we always forget that when we study abroad we´re not transposing our lives onto a new country, but rather, this new country is transposing itself upon us and our behaviors, attitudes, mindsets and daily activities. I can´t be the Nikki that I am in the US here. And if I try to be this person, I´m probably going to spontaneously combust. Literally. That´s how much electric thought fury reverberates in my mind at all times, every day. This is not to say that I have to change myself completely, it´s mostly that I have to bend myself into new curves and angles to fit those of Argentina.
And more importantly, I have to stop trying to make sure that those curves put me at a size 0 and that the angles aren´t all a perfect 90º.
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