#viewsaremyown

Oh hey.

Well I suppose it’s been a wee while. By a wee while I mean the span of one whole year and a handful of months. In those months I’d say a darn lot has gone on. I haven’t found the word for it yet (though I’m sure it exists), but does anyone else ever feel that sense of panic that they’ll just forget little details of life? Experiences, old, current, new, are remembered in different lights. I look back on my first year as an Brit-In-Residence in Amuricah and I have flashes of good times, sad times, hilarious times, frustrating times (oh way more of those than I expected - the T in my ‘water’ is now a D). New York City remains to me to be a daily dose of starry eyed first time in the Big Apple-ness, seriously. Even the pee smell, the subways and their stick, confusing sports team affiliations. I’ve been writing down everything, just in enough different places that the aforementioned memory loss panic is setting in. Every place I eat, drink (lolz), run, frolic, I want to remember. And i do, mostly.

There’s been some epiphanies; I am a British person with an American passport in America. I am not an American in America. I mean this entirely in the culture-clash sense. One I did not anticipate to affect me on such a scale. 

The Clash became clear most recently with certain conversations (many frustratingly cyclical) surrounding the fun-time politics of the past couple of years, bounding towards a finish line which has been positioned on the edge of a volcano (picture the Mufasa death scene in the Lion King). A self confessed bleeding heart liberal, my views on the world, how its inhabitants should treat it and each other have been shaped by an equally liberal set of parents, but in a country that has let my liberal tendencies prosper quite happily and peacefully like fat organic carrots in an allotment. Growing free, unbothered by Nancy next-door, though you know that Nancy’s growing tomatoes and her Tomo-Growth ™ would probably hurt your carrots if they came into contact, but they don’t so that’s alright. Over here, conversations happen and they happen in a big way, and no amount of my anti-confrontational pixie dust can make them disappear. I would hot foot straight to the corner of staunch British ‘well I suppose you may be right’, I’d change the subject, I’d nod and think to myself what a load of crap I’m listening to, but I now realize that silence is compliance. Grinning and bearing it and reassurances turned to longing of ‘this would never happen in the UK’ just don’t quite cut it anymore. So I do what I can to stay informed - I read, I write, I listen - to all sides, where possible - and I teach myself how to chip in. I could put this all down to the differences between UK and US politics (of which there are increasingly less, it has become more apparent), I could put it down to a move out of my comfort zone - I think it’s probably a bit of both. It’s been a time coming, though. 

See y’all in another year and few months.