Given that I live in a country that’s not where I am from and am married to someone from yet another country, I suppose I spend a little bit more time than the average person in thinking about where I want to live.
From my first visit to Australia nine years ago, I felt that I fit in. Whether in the city on the beach or in the outback, I found I could relate to the people and that I intrinsically belonged even though I did not live in the country. Maybe being married to an Aussie had something to do with that belonging, but I don’t think that’s the complete answer. My friend Debora has lived in Stockholm on and off for 25 years and is married to a Swede, but still does not feel like she fits in there. “Unlike Asia, you look like you belong in Sweden,” she says. “So you have a false sense that you do belong. But you don’t. I am not from Sweden and am too loud and too American to fit in completely.”
Although I have a fantastic life that I love in Stockholm, I still don’t have that same connected feeling that I get in Oz. And for the moment, I don’t feel like I belong in the US either. I suppose I’ve gotten addicted to the exotic lifestyle of living internationally. It’s an interesting place to be in, but also confusing as it gets down to the question of where I belong in the world. I have not worked that out yet. But this search for belonging is one of the main themes in my book. I will keep you posted on how the process goes.
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Your writing on this subject brought up another Swedish cultural habit worth pointing out. Other-ness. American and Australia are two young countries that tramped over native populations to make way for assorted Europeans looking to get out of the strict confines of their own cultures and call it a New World. The melting pot nature of things meant you worked with strangers to build barns, houses, towns. People had to pull together or they wouldn’t pull through. What lingers even after is the openness to strangers as potential friends or at least not as threats to the social order. In Sweden people tend to be friends with people they have always known, literally since infancy. Swedes that go out of Sweden and travel experience this openness like it, marvel at it, practice it but know back home it would be considered a violation of personal space. Intrusive. To practice that here would be the wholesale acceptance of a cultural trait that isn’t theirs no matter how many American TV shows are broadcasted here. They can accept that Muslim women are walking the streets of Stockholm in their native dress but it doesn’t mean they’ll start covering their own heads. I suspect if they had to choose at gunpoint to adopt petty civilities and chit chat or head scarves they’d go with the scarves.
Why does it seem to me that you and Robert will end up living in Oz at some point? Which means that I will have to compel MY Robert to get on an airplane and plunk his bum into a seat and endure the god-knows-how-many-hour-long flight to go visit you.
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