On what they see and what they miss

Published on 19th February 2020

Hi all,

As the weeks go on, I feel like this blog is becoming less like a blog and more like a creative brain dump (sorry about that). I suppose that’s mostly because the idea of laundry-listing my experiences here each month felt somehow sterile, and I wanted to explore different ways to write about how I’ve been feeling.

The last five months have passed so quickly for me, which I think is part of becoming an adult — sometimes the drumbeat of a routine can blur days together. The upside is that in the moments between drumbeats there’s a lot of space for reflection. The common refrain goes that the time immediately after college is for “finding yourself,” that is, figuring out what you like and don’t like, and also, I’d say, who you are and are not. When you move to a place where few people know you, I think part of “finding yourself” also becomes looking at yourself in the eyes of others, examining what they see and what they miss.

The anonymity of moving to a new place can be both entrapping and liberating. Oftentimes there are large gaps between how others see us (or we think they see us) and how we see ourselves. These are gaps that are worth exploring. Here's my shot at it.

What they see is someone who is reserved, distant. Someone who lingers on the fringes of conversations, like the sea foam left by waves as they hit the beach. She asks questions when she can, but rarely offers up her own answers, and they usually don’t ask anyway. She is quiet, some might say shy. More than anything, she is serious. She comes to school to work, goes to the gym to workout, returns home to type notes in her computer. Days pass. Weeks pass. Months.

I’m becoming a better listener. I think this is what happens when you spend many hours surrounded by conversations in a language that is not your own but which you are trying to teach your tongue to embrace. You wait for the right moment when you might be able to say something too, but sometimes it doesn’t come, because you realize you are learning more from other people’s words than you could ever learn from your own. I worry people think I’m disinterested or uninteresting, though I know I am neither. Sometimes it is hard to know how to share yourself. If I was better at it maybe I would still walk around with the label “serious,” but perhaps I could have other labels as well. “Complicated.” “Cares too much, but in a beautiful-ish way.” “Figuring it out.”

What they see is an object, someone who walks around in leggings and a tank top in order to be consumed. They honk from their taxis and make low hissing sounds, the sort of sounds that make her feel like meat, not a piece of meat but many pieces of it, ground beef. She says nothing, they think, because she is flattered.

I hear the noises they make, watch the paths their eyes follow, usually as I walk to and from the gym. The gym, one of the only places I feel powerful, or at least not weak. They try to take that away from me. I want to scream back at them, probably expletives, like I sometimes used to when I ran on the sidewalks in Tempe. I stay quiet. I think about a friend who told me when taxi drivers honk at her, as they often do, with their short beeps followed by the turn of a neck, she honks back. “Meep, meep!” she yells. They often laugh. Thinking of this, I laugh too. I visualize the day when I will be able to yell back at the drivers that harass me and the women who surround me for just being. I visualize the day when I won’t need to. I am conscious that those days will probably never come.

They see what they’ve been told an American should look like. Who has told them this, that sunburnt skin, blonde hair and blue eyes are the red, white and blue of the U.S.? TV? Books? The news? Other white Americans? It doesn’t matter. She fits into this package, and packages always make things easier, even if there are some things they also hide. They see someone who can choose where to live, where to be, whom to be with. What choices.

I am the trope of the American spring breaker. My hair color is the same as our hair color on TV. They tell me that, that I look like an American. That I look like what they’ve been told an American should look like. Who told them that? By being here, by standing in front of my students, am I telling them that I am what an American should look like? How do I tell them that’s not true? That I’m not true? Or that I’m true, but not representative? That I was given Americanness without struggle? Or without the same struggle? How do I apologize for the things people who look like me have done? For the things I’ve done? I write American and I cringe. Why don’t we have a better word for this in English, a more specific word? One that doesn’t evoke an entire continent? U.S. citizen? But it’s not about citizenship. Is it about identity? You can read my identity on my forehead, but what’s between those lines, and who wrote them? What do they leave out? Who?

They see an English teacher. Or rather, they see someone who is teaching English. Who writes exercises on the board: past simple, present continuous, third conditional. Tenses that hold tension, the pressure of a better future, the weight of powerful countries, powerful governments, good jobs. They ask why a lot, and she only sometimes has the answer. Sometimes she tries to use Spanish to explain English, and they try to use English to explain Spanish, and most times the words just rub against each other, the two languages existing on different planes because of the different feelings they evoke. They see someone who the universe chose to speak the “universal language” and who is now further universalizing it. What luck.

I teach English. Not because I’m a teacher but because I’m a speaker. When I taught writing in prisons, it was similar — I wasn’t truly a teacher, but I was a writer. In both cases, I was (am) mostly just a warm body to ask questions and sometimes try to answer them. To be clear, this is problematic. Teaching is technical, and anyone who says you don’t need training on those technicalities is lying to you or to themselves or both. And so that’s one of the reasons I so often worry I’m failing my students, it’s one of the problems with what I’m doing now, teaching English. English, a language that has so often been used to oppress, or at least exclude. The “universal language.” But whose universe is it? I teach English not because I think that doing so will necessarily make the world a better place, but because I know what learning another language gave me, the doors it opened. It allowed me to fall in love. With people, with a person, and with many places. Those are feelings I want to share. And of course, English is the language I know how to teach. But I worry, in particular, about whether, caught up in our obsession with English, we leave other languages behind. Perhaps a second language can be both glue and eraser, connecting and wiping away. Before class, I Google past simple, present continuous, third conditional. I write exercises on the board. I trust my students to choose glue over eraser.