Quote:
Originally Posted by Cynthetiq
Do you mean you notice it more in Iceland because you see it more in society or yourself? Is this because there is more "down time" than when you were in the US?
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Certainly, since I'm basically on my own for most of the day--and have been for the last 12+ months. I'm also a pretty intense navel-gazer, even in my busiest times--I journal like mad, always trying to figure out the next puzzle about who I am.
And it's not because of Icelandic society, in itself--even if I were very busy here, I still think I would be thinking about these kinds of things. It comes down to the fact that in Iceland, my family (who are everywhere around me) sees me as an orphan of some kind--the defining fact of my life happened before I was born, which was that their son/brother/my father died. And I perceive that they can't help but view me through that lens--all the things that could have been, all the things that they had envisioned for their son/brother, all cut short. And the pressure that I put on myself (and often hear in their comments) is immense, to deal with that shit.
The Icelandic society part is that no one ever wants to discuss these kinds of things (unless they're shit-faced drunk, which with my family is once a year--not enough for me to communicate with them)--they don't want to talk about accepting the unacceptable, about how or whether they coped or not, about what they went through when this event happened to them. And so all the questions float about in my head, during all this unstructured time on my hands, and yes, I am tired of it. I would like to be away from it--to no longer be seen as an orphan, but as someone with a mom, dad (even if he is my stepdad--but they rarely acknowledge him here), a life wholly apart from who my father was in Iceland. I feel that I can never really get away from it, as long as I am living in Iceland.
(This is turning into more of an extended journal entry than a thread, yikes!)