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I'm Not Drunk, I'm Just Cheerful.

Explaining myself to America was harder than I expected.

By Adriana MPublished 3 years ago 8 min read
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Many years ago, I found myself in a serious pickle. Born and raised in a third-world country where most people live under the poverty line, I knew education was my way to build a decent living. After working my ass off through Medical School and then Ph.D. in Biomedical Sciences, I landed one of the very few available positions in the country as a University professor. I was excited and happy, thinking my gamble on a more extended education in a highly specialized field had paid off.

Then a couple of years later, out of the blue, it all came crashing down. The University where I worked was a private institution; it turned out the president and the board of directors were embezzling money, and the place was bankrupt. A national institution closed its doors with no warning. I was out of a job and out of prospects. I said a Hail Mary, used the last of my savings to attend a big international conference, and lined up a bunch of interviews, hoping for the best. The best indeed came: I was offered a job by an American University.

Feeling immensely grateful, I packed my bags and my kid, and in a couple of months, I was living in the US. I honestly thought the culture shock would not be too much: South American countries are highly influenced by American culture; I was fluent in English and had been in the States both for business and vacation many times. I was sure once I got over the heartbreak of living away from my family, things would roll smoothly.

It turns out, things were anything but smooth. Cultural shock comes in many different flavors, many of them insidious and unassuming. It’s almost as if the foreign culture gaslights the newcomer. The sense of “otherness” creeps onto you like water torture, too subtle to pinpoint it but extremely painful over time.

The first punch was quite blunt, though: creating a living space. I found a house through the University housing, the rent much more expensive than I expected, but any other options that appeared to be available were not: turns out, in many college towns in the US, “for lease” means “for lease next year.” Then came the part that made me cry for days: trying to furnish the space. The University housing had a community center where a bunch of cheerful retirees eager to help provided me with names and coupons for mattress and furniture stores. Unfortunately, these joyful helpers were utterly clueless about what it means to move to another country with only a few dollars to your name. All the stores they recommended were high-end, the kind of place where a mattress would cost at least three months of my brand new salary and a couch was nothing but a hopeless dream. Not knowing any better, I sat on the staircase of my empty townhouse, crying, thinking I had moved my kid across the sea only to end up sleeping on a dirty carpet.

Let me also mention other things that you do not have when you are freshly moved: getting a social security number takes about two months, which means you cannot get a cell phone plan. You have no driver’s license because that requires two pieces of a government-issued ID, and you have only a foreign passport. You have no credit, so there is no way to get credit cards, or leeway offers to take any furniture home. I even had trouble getting the bank to release my first direct deposit paycheck.

When I opened the account, I filed the paperwork the way I was used to in my home country (first and one last name only), but my passport shows first name and two last names (mother and father’s surnames) only in my country the default custom is to ignore the second surname. No such custom here, so according to the bank, the person who opened the account was not the same person who received the paycheck. Imagine how this feels: I went to withdraw some money from my hard-earned salary. The teller, a guy with a toad face, counts it, and as I am retrieving it, he reaches and pulls it back off my hands, yelling for the manager. The rest of the episode is a blur. I was distraught, embarrassed, and confused; I could not understand what I had done and why this person treated me like a criminal. After many years living here, I now understand I was unlucky enough to cross paths with a shitty bank teller. Still, at the moment, all I saw was a weird guy ripping my money off my hands and making me feel I had no right to it because I was foreign and, therefore, a liar.

Things clear out slowly after you finally get on the mail a social security number and work permit (two pieces of ID that now allow you to get a driver’s license), then finally you can get a cell phone, some credit, and so on. But the otherness still lurks in the shadows. Even in the most basic things. When the summer came, I was excited to pull out my favorite clothes. I put on a bright, pink tank with a low cleavage that was part of my usual wardrobe back home, paired it with jeans, and happily headed to work. When I got on the shuttle, suddenly, all eyes were on me. I was too bright and too festive for a Midwest town. People’s version of summer clothing here was tan-colored t-shirts with crew necks so high they almost looked like turtlenecks. I rode the shuttle for a couple of blocks, then got off and walked back home to change. As soon as I could, I bought a bunch of bland-colored boxy t-shirts with those ugly crewnecks so that I wouldn’t feel so out of place. I remember looking in the mirror and wondering how I had gone from sexy Latina to frumpy midwesterner and thinking maybe that was it, no way back. If I didn’t want to stick out like a sore thumb, it meant letting my beauty go. At the moment, it felt like the only way to survive the environment.

Then came the social interaction, or lack thereof. Back in my home country, scientists were a fun kind of weirdos, the ones with the crazy ideas and a lot of joy to go with them. In my new workplace, it seemed like many people had chosen this line of work because it required the least amount of social interaction. Many times, people you crossed in the hallways do not respond to a salute, and the guy sitting on the desk next to yours only communicates via email. Being “too busy to talk” was a badge of honor. I later learned that not all places were like that, but the thing is that would never be the case where I came from: personal interaction was more important than anything else in my homeland.

Finally, someone threw a party. I was so excited, hungry for some socializing. I brought Latino music, tried to teach them a few party games, and told many jokes. The response was lukewarm at best. I made it about two hours before I felt completely drained and went home. I was surprised to hear the following Monday that the party had lasted until the wee hours. I could not fathom how: the place looked dead when I left. I politely avoided other invitations, not sure how much of that kind of party I could take.

Then after a few months, it was the holiday season, and the office did a secret Santa game. When it came time to guess who I was, my secret Santa described someone “loud, cheery, the one you would find dancing on tables and wooing after shots.” I was utterly lost and had no idea who this person was talking about until they approached and presented me with a gag gift: a box called “one thousand drinking games.”

My blood ran cold. So this was what the office thought of me. I went to one party, tried hard to be friendly, to ignite the dull crowd, and get them to dance and laugh a little. They assumed that the reason I was acting like that had to be because I was drunk. It turns out this group only got friendly after a lot of liquid courage. So when I showed up already light and loud, they assumed I had been doing some heavy pre-drinking. I had not even heard the term before, and yet I was officially the town drunk. I wanted the ground to open and swallow me whole.

It’s been years since my arrival, and I’ve had many epiphanies. I am still the odd man out, but in a good way: I allowed my Latino cheerfulness and allure to come back in full and learned that other people’s opinions or misconceptions didn’t carry any real influence into my life. I stick out, but not like a sore thumb: now that I allow my authentic self to be seen, I shine like a colorful butterfly.

Embarrassment
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About the Creator

Adriana M

Neuroscientist, writer, renaissance woman .

instagram: @kindmindedadri

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