So, You're Not a Superhero

So you’re not a superhero. You get frustrated when you mix up verb tenses. You can’t cross the street without saying a small prayer. You’re not conventionally attractive, by American or Bengali standards. You stall in your writing – and your reading and your half-made plans. You take off your kameez one shoulder at a time, hopping on one foot as you tug on the sweaty fabric. You jump at the tiniest tik tiki movement on the wall across from you. You burst out of your new shoes. None of this is possible without you.

I moved to Dhaka a little over 2 weeks ago with the intention to write. I was here 2 years ago on a research project about perceptions of mental health and mental illness, but felt like all of the stories I was collecting deserved a better home than just an academic paper that would be read by only a few people. It was then that the idea for my novel manifested – and now I finally get to pursue it.

I also moved here as a challenge. I needed to shake myself out of my skin, my NYC hustle, and the perfectionism that keeps me from doing the work that I really want to do. It’s an amazing opportunity, but I’m also struggling with it. In my head, I wanted to pick up where I left off in my Bangla study, meet with new friends, and build a community around things that I care about – particularly social justice work. But all of these things take time.

The greatest work is to adjust my expectations as a person with a Western sense of timeline and a tendency towards impatience. It’s hard for me – when sitting down to verb charts or a blank page – to remember that learning isn’t often linear. It’s equally hard to admit feeling lonely and frustrated. I feel sometimes that I have to front like I’m superhuman and don’t have off days. It feels very much like my traveling has come to an end, and I have to learn to be settled.

Recently I’ve turned to this well-worn advice for writers: Revel in the questions. Be less concerned with the answers. Answers are, after all, a matter of growth rather than destination. And even though the results are TBA, I’m cultivating some gratitude for these hard moments as a way to connect more deeply with myself and with others.

Have you ever hit this point? Had these kinds of experiences adjusting to a new lifestyle? I’d love to hear from you – Tweet me @thecowation.

The Wheel and the Hook

Passionate about ordinary things, like how ingredients become food – that detail was included in the winning story told at the Moth event I attended last week. The detail was in reference to the storyteller’s friend (the subject of their piece), and I felt a kinship because of that choice; I too am passionate about ordinary things.

The storyteller was actually a Barnard grad. It was some coincidence to walk into a bar in Portland and be identified immediately by this piece of my New York life. On top of that, the story they told was powerful and hit close to home. It seemed closer to fate than coincidence when this person who shared several of my identities got up and told a story about their days on campus that played on the theme of the night: ‘Save’. I wish that I could have snagged them afterward to thank them for telling it, but by then they had disappeared into the night.

Me trying to feed a carrot to a b&w fuzzy llama; I'm trying so hard to get them to like me.

I have been doing a bit of travel lately. Apart from moving back to Seattle from NYC, I have also been visiting friends in common and uncommon places. Several weeks ago, I went to visit my high school friend in Arkansas where he is now teaching. I feel like I’m still processing that brief trip; it was my first time to the South and to a town like Pine Bluff, where the urban decay is so visible. I felt in many ways that I was in the Land of Contradictions, so I’ve been thinking about how to write in a way that really honors that. I’m working on a (more polished) piece about it, so stay tuned.

Last week I was in Portland where my best friend from elementary school lives. We did our usual gallivanting – thrifted for butter dishes and books, saw that amazing Moth Storyslam, adopted a cat. We also went to #realOregon for a sheep to shawl festival that I got very excited about. I’m an avid knitter and also am interested in the political implications of knowing about how we get our clothes (knit and otherwise). I’d never been to a shearing, so watching a llama get its hair taken off was actually super interesting.

But perhaps the best part was seeing people spin yarn out of fiber using nothing more than drop spindle. For some reason I thought that you needed the big machinery of a loom in order to spin yarn, but it appears that for a more traditional practice you only need a funny looking little wheel on a hook. As my friend remarked, it really does make you think about all the effort that goes into making a garment by hand. Sure, we do have factories now and different processes are more automated, but there are still so many hands that go into making the things that we buy (much too cheaply for the labor, I might add).

I’ve been thinking a lot about things that we take for granted: clothes, food, safety. Coming back from the trip, I found myself reading Vandana Shiva’s Staying Alive and Googling restorative justice programs. I don’t yet have a clear picture of what I’ll do with all this information – for instance, even though I now possess a drop spindle, I doubt I’ll start making all my clothes by hand. But at the event, I felt humbled and encouraged by the storyteller’s rendering of their friend’s life. Through their use of language, they elevated the ordinary and left me chewing on ideas of how to do the same.

Appreciating Food through Its Politics

I want to lighten it up a little as we enter this week. I've been writing on heavy topics (both on the blog and in my private writing) because it's better to let them out than to keep them rattling around in my head. However, I think we all deserve a good diet of sweet with our bitter, dessert with our vegetables and all that. And perhaps one of the easiest ways to do that is to talk about my love of food.

Happiness Is...

 

- A room with pen and paper

- A good meal shared with family and friends (my current favorite is pullao with goat curry and potatoes; I can eat it all. day. long.)

- Cuddling up and talking for hours with someone you care about

- Watching your niece grow up to be taller than you!

- A clear lightning storm against a dark sky

- Listening to your friends make music, watching them make art, and cheering them on

- A book and some free time

- A busy schedule of appointments that you'll actually enjoy

Join me today and make a list of all the little things that make you happy/that you're grateful for; it can be as abstract or as concrete as you like! Often when we struggle, we don't think about the positives that surround us every day. When you're really down, it's hard to see how the light that is all around us. But it is there, and we all have something to be grateful for. Take a few moments today and explore them.

In the mood for lists? Here are some more!

Immigrant Mourning

How does one feel sadness properly?

This week opens for me with a very recent death and a very raw period of mourning. As much as I believe that death is a natural inevitable process, it still shakes you to the core when it comes close. It's almost enough to make me want to write clichéd sentences moralizing about those who have passed on and those who remain here with us. Almost.

But more than that, I feel very strongly that I must talk about the experience of being in mourning as an immigrant. I am part of the satellite family that lives several time zones away, and I am apart not only from our larger family, but from my own small family as well. Though it is never easy to drop everything and deal with a family emergency, we don't even have the option to return home. We can only orbit around, waiting for a time to return to them. We grieve alone.

I find it odd that this aspect of the immigrant experience is understated. Intellectually, I know that it is overshadowed by the rhetoric of the American dream and the opportunities of entering a new life, forging an individual path, and participating in capitalism, but my heart is focused elsewhere. It shows me the profound loss that is involved in moving halfway across the globe for so-called opportunities. The inevitable missing of births and deaths, the broken families, and the hard edge of being alone - my heart takes in these feelings and tries to blunt them so that I can be sad in a proper manner. So that I don't tie in my individual sadness with the infrastructure that contributes to it. So that I can still feel good about the place that I live in, have been adopted into, even as I yearn to be with my family and take rest.

Months back, during Thanksgiving, I wrote a piece on gratitude for Dear Sugar and I talked about returning to Bangladesh for the first time last year. I wrote:

"I am grateful for that empty place at the table. I am thankful that sometimes people need not know each other to care for them. We are contributing to the stockpile of love in the universe – whether that’s through writing advice columns or finding gratitude in the hardest moments. What we manifest is who we ultimately become."

I am caring and I am loving from afar. I cannot reach that empty place at the table, and neither can many of my family members. But it is there.

How does one feel sadness properly? I want to address this question in my posts this week. Look out for some more writing on sadness and mourning in the next few days. And thank you, as always, for reading.

On Gratitude: 4 Ways to Bring it Into Everyday Life

Happy Thanksgiving!

Now that you've getting a hefty dose of tryptophan and starches in your diet (and more than a small serving of my counternarrative argument from yesterday's post), I want to introduce some levity into the idea of Thanksgiving.

I think it's a great holiday because it highlights - however strangely - the need for community and the need for gratitude in the American way of life. Gratitude and being thankful can often be overlooked or overshadowed as we go about wielding our extreme individualism and slaying the demon of time management. In our culture, gratitude often only makes a holiday appearance, but today I want to tell you how you can carry it into the rest of your year. Here are some ideas: