Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes
Sitting in Butterfinger’s Pancakes, a Western style restaurant that specializes in its breakfast foods, with a friend this Sunday morning at 11:30am, she asks me, toward the end of our meal of pancakes, “Have you changed this year?”
I think for a minute, and answer, “Yes. I have changed a lot.”
“How so?” is the response shot back at me.
I look up into the corner of the ceiling, a common trait I happen to share with my little sister, that I tend to do when contemplating something-anything. In a flash, this year – August 11, 2009, to today, July 18, 2010, not quite a year, but close enough – races through my mind. I think back to the state in which i came to Korea, and the different state I find myself in now.
“Well, I think about missions differently. I’m not sure what I think about missions anymore, nor if I’m still called to it – explicitly, or even just at all.” She echoes her agreement, and a few of the same sentiments, only with her own personal taint.
“I also have become more introverted.”
She smiles. “I think you’re still pretty extroverted and outgoing.”
I smile back. “See, I was when I came here. I committed to a lot of things, because my outgoing-ness from the States carried over, but then it was gone, as I adjusted to my new surroundings here. So, the only reason I kept doing those things, was because I had already committed to them. So I made myself go, even when I would rather just sit in my apartment. Even when it came to hanging out with people and building relationships. I never had to deal with that in the States. I never felt that way. Well, rarely.”
She nods her in understanding as I continue. “I see how important community is now, really. I mean, it was a common theme in my college-”
“Yeah, I thought it was. Didn’t you already value community because of you college?” she asks.
“Well, no. Not really. See, at my college, they were SO focused on “community” and “conversations” and we used to make fun of it. I mean, I was in a community, and I used to make fun of it with the girls I lived with. But now, when I’m without a community here, I see the value, and even necessity of it.”
After our conversation, after I threw the question back onto her, and then we are promptly passive-aggressively pushed out of the restaurant by the Korean waiter, I think more about how I have changed. I have also learned how to communicate. Being in a meaningful, mutually beneficial, long-distance relationship with someone kind of thrusts that lesson upon you, however unwanted. I have learned that, like it or not, I have to try to explain what I am thinking and feeling. I can’t sit and cry about how people don’t understand me, and how I am lonely, when to the people who care about me most – the ones who are trying to understand me – I am not letting in. I assume they won’t understand. I assume they don’t need my problems dumped on them too. I assume that if I tell him more of who I am, we are moving to fast, or he will reject me. But I came to the point here in Korea that I realized that these people are all I have (in one sense) and they love me enough to try. So I can too.
I’m not done. This same friend I shared breakfast with this morning challenged me to open the “packed full closet of my mind” and pull out a “box”, and organize it, or throw it out. Then the next day, pull out another box. To me, this sounded like unnecessary effort when I can exist in peace without dealing with anything. I was giving her advice on this very subject, and she turned it around on me. Again. So, as long as I take her advice over the next 26 days, I will have even more changes to write about soon.
