Letter from Ireland, pt. 5

[Currently listening to the World Cafe streaming on WUMB. Great show! Steve Earle--Revolution Starts Now.]

If they can't, or won't, explicitly communicate their reaction to me and my environment on a visit, let me say that it has taken 28 years to understand my relation to myself. And in that time I have suffered a prolonged confusion about the environment I tried to relate to, so unevenly. And in that time I never once thought about a larger picture, larger possibility, but instead internalized my difficulties as a reflection on myself. And never once considered the problem might be external, or at least considered that I was coming at the problem at an angle, askew, and that there was nothing wrong with where I was, and where I was coming from.

The problem lay in not knowing we were askew, myself and my surroundings. An immigrant, a traveler anywhere, might get homesick, but at least, amid all the strangeness, the difference, the discomfort, he knows the reason: He is a stranger, customs are different here. The difference is not cast back on himself (by him, at least.) He does not internalize that difference.

[Okay, I have to butt into my letter to editorialize: I can't help but recognize how accurately I described here what was being researched and written up during the same time: the freedom in having a reason for difference that the supposedly integrated first-generation American may not have.]

I did feel that problems of integration lay within me, and along the way I also internalized anger and frustration to match the confusion and discomfort.

So. When I sense a certain confusion or even hostility in visitors, I recognize it. And I do nothing to soothe it because amidst my past of confusion, I naturally collected this hostility and resentment of my own, and I internalized it too. My attitude does involve rejection and is not just the result of a happy circumstance of waking up to the root of my difference, saying "Oh sorry, excuse me," and going on my merry way to Ireland. Too late for that. A certain resentment has become entrenched in my character, an obstinacy, and on reflection, I think I'll keep it.

tbc.