Identity crisis solved
I recently decided that I was having an identity crisis. I wasn’t about to let a little detail like not knowing what an identity crisis is stop me from the pleasure of self-diagnosis. But that left me with the next logical question: what does one do when one has an identity crisis?
Well, I reasoned, since the best thing to do in any crisis is to make a list, the obvious answer was to make a short list of the details of my evolving daily life so that I could then look at the list and decide what’s going on…
1. Living in a small tropical border town in Southeast Asia where I am marginally employed and spend my time talking to other expats and/or getting into awkward emotional situations
2. My town has a solid population of British expats who seem to spend a great deal of time drinking themselves into oblivion in seedy bars and associating with prostitutes; but truthfully, when I really look at it, everyone here seems lost and me no less than most
3. Deeply questioning some of my long-held codes of morality and feeling very unsettled by that process
4. Struggling internally to find/reaffirm faith
I re-read my list a few times, gave it some thought and decided that yep, that pretty much covers the bases. It also sounded oddly familiar. At first I assumed that looking at my own life and having it sound like a book I’d read was just par for the course with an identity crisis but then…no, it really did sound familiar. Very familiar. It sounded like…like…Oh my god that’s it…
I have become a character in a Graham Greene novel.
And that was that – identity crisis solved.
Tags: Nong Khai, Thailand
sandra_101
…at least your not a character in a Kafka novel.