It’s a rainy Sunday in the field. I just woke up in my tent, am sipping Nescafe, and sitting here preparing for a donor visit, wondering how so much time has passed without writing. Much of me knows that while writing has always been therapeutic for me, lately I just haven’t had the energy to put down in words what has been going on. I’m feeling a bit misguided and flustered, to be honest. I’ve been travelling a lot. In the past two months, I’ve flown across the pond twice—once for home leave to visit family and friends, and most recently, for a health conference at headquarters.
Both visits have been timely, in that work has felt consistently overwhelming and stressful, relentlessly exhausting, and six months into my time in Juba, most days I feel like I’m still trying to find my feet, and while I feel I’ve built up some confidence with work, I often feel like most days are spent trying to keep myself afloat. I still find myself navigating the social scene here, and still have days of loneliness, lack of fulfillment, undeniable fatigue. And while I don’t know that I’ve found a healthy routine or manageable way to pass through the weeks, time is somehow flying by at record speed. It’s incredible to compare my time here to the six months I spent in Tanzania, and how my experience unfolded in such a distinctly different way. I want to love Juba, I really do. I see other expats thriving in this environment and I wonder what it is I’m missing, or doing wrong, or lacking in my own, freakishly bizarre existence here, and I can’t seem to put my finger on it. I enjoy my work; I love my colleagues; I feel inspired by the country and the people that have struggled for decades to be where they are. But most days, I just wonder where I would be if I had made different choices, and wondering how much longer I can maintain this lifestyle.
The irony is that I’ve been doing this long enough that when I’m home, I also don’t feel like I “fit” there anymore. The creature comforts of home feel somehow too accessible, too easy. My siblings and friends are parents and home owners and measure the happiness and success of their worlds in such different ways than I do. And while it was amazing to reconnect with friends and have treasured time with family, I found myself oddly craving aspects of my strange world across the sea. Home felt simultaneously bizarre and familiar, and in the time it takes me to readjust to being there, I’m back in Africa again. Seeing my family and friends was rejuvenating in a way that only being around people that know you well can be—their support and understanding, their patience, thoughtfulness, acknowledgement of my quirks and need for space. And while I cherished that time with them, I accept in myself that a world surrounded by my own kids and 9-5 job is unlikely and simply not part of who I am or what I want right now…and I found that conclusion to be strange, and slightly contradictory to what I expected to feel.
Being home also made me realize that as much as my life seems to be changing—yes, I’ve moved to a number of different countries on the continent of Africa in recent years—that overall, my life feels static, stagnant, perhaps even a bit stale. That while my lifestyle lends itself to steep learning curves and new experiences, that not much feels all that different than it did. And yet my friends and family are finding great partners, getting married, having babies, and I sadly find myself resentful of that—that I’m still alone and can’t figure out just what I’m doing wrong. I discovered that an ex of mine just recently got married and is having a baby, yet I haven’t been in a relationship that has lasted longer than a few months in years. Years, people. I don’t want to feel bitterness towards people I care about because they’ve been able to find companionship and I haven’t. It feels horrible, and I find myself retreating from those relationships because I am envious of what they have. And so it seems that I don’t want life at home and I don’t want life here. So, I’m basically humming a tune in my head, days away from my 33rd birthday, singing, “Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, here I am, stuck in the middle with…me.”
