Adaptation

Everyone has anxiety dreams of walking through identical bland hallways, running into the same faces like a sick broken record. For some people, this is where they wake up. For me, it was the first day of middle school in suburban Houston, Texas. I’m what people call a TCK – third culture kid. My father worked for a major oil company and for all of my childhood, home was wherever we laid down our posessions. Before I arrived in Houston at age eleven, I’d only lived in the United States for two years before elementary school. Not even American by blood – my parents are Brasilian and Greek. This is the complicated pedigree I’ve lived with my whole life, and I wouldn’t change it.

But that first day in Houston, looking at a sea of American kids who’d grown up together, I wished with eleven year old fervor that I wasn’t so different. I wished that the teacher didn’t introduce me as, "A girl who’s lived in Africa!" and I wished my classmates didn’t translate that into harmlessly cruel middle-school-speak as "that African girl". I wished I didn’t have to explain that no, I didn’t ride elephants to school. I wanted desperately to be back in the relative safety of overseas International schools, where everyone has a different skin, religion, language, and where conformity was impossible and thus not in high demand.

But I wasn’t. I was in suburban Houston. And when my incredibly generous and understanding parents saw how hard it was, they told me I’d have to learn to adapt. It sounds like an easy concept, but everyone learns by trial and error. How I adapted, indeed how I always adapted in the seven different countries and schools, was more of a mutation than anything. After being teased about my glasses and my precocious reading habit, I started wearing contacts and joined theatre. After being called a geek, I spent more time at malls than the museums of my childhood raptures. In the three years we lived in Houston, I passed as a remarkably well-adjusted American teen. That is, bratty, self-involved, a little lost and bordering on flaky.

When we got the transfer to Kenya after ninth grade, I remember feeling a secret relief that I could return to the "other" me. The younger, more innocent girl who loved books, talked to her dogs, made friends with everyone, and dragged her parents to every temple in Greece, blabbing into the video camera about which god or goddess had been worshipped there. So what was adaptation, I asked myself later? Which me was me – the mall-hopping American teen, or the gregarious geek? Was it both? When I returned to Houston for senior year of high school after two refreshing and life-altering years in Nairobi, I started to grasp the difference between adaptation and mutation.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about my relatively unique childhood, which I often have to trot out begrudgingly for bewildered newcomers to my life. Yes, it was marvellous and hard. Yes, I learned about cultural tolerance from such a young age, it’s a natural language to me. Yes, I can travel almost anywhere in the world and feel at home. But I’m not comfortable with the idea that my father’s career as an accountant has made me more culturally aware than any brilliant American who’s never left the continent. After all, I didn’t choose to go overseas and live a different life. What I learned about myself overseas had nothing to do with language or tolerance or riding elephants. Rather, I learned that life is tough and it’s not going to be comfortable. I will not always be surrounded by the familiarity of place, and my character cannot be sustained by geography or conformity. Living a life as mobile as I did offers the temptation to sleuth out the modus operandi and toe the appropriate lines. But I learned by trial and error that place, and character, are what you make of them.

Adaptation is not about staying true to your surroundings, or molding your character on those around you. That’s simply mutation, a trait exclusively claimed by chameleons. True adaptation, and true character, is about staying true to yourself perhaps in spite of your surroundings. Understanding yourself isn’t something handed to you at birth, not even for the carefree and stable children whose life I coveted everytime I saw my life in boxes and a plane taking us off to another strange place. When I was younger, I used to tell my parents that I’d give my own kids a home whose walls they’d known since infancy, friends they’d grown up with. But even those children need to learn what standing firm means, and I was lucky enough to have a strong dose of that reality from an early age. That is more important to me than languages or exotic countries.

My life, having not chosen it or the places it took me to, doesn’t make me better than anyone else. I’m loath to accept that interpretation. I’m often bewildered by the impressed reactions my background garners. Coming back to the States, finally seeing myself as an American, and choosing to continue my life here on almost foreign soil, was a difficult decision for me. I had the opportunity to go overseas again after graduation from college and I chose this country, over all the others I’ve lived in, because I’ve learned how to adapt here. How to appreciate its culture as much as any of the others I’ve seen. But I wouldn’t have come to that decision without realizing the value of what my other life gave me.

I may be more versatile with foreign ground because of my childhood. But that’s a surface benefit. Fluency in French doesn’t make me a stronger person, or provide me with the character and backbone I’ll need to succeed. What most prepares me for the world, as I embark on law school and life, is the benefit of knowing the difference between fitting in, and fitting into yourself.

love, krissa .... 11:58 AM ... link!

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so everybody put your best suit or dress on...



beth, east village, march 2003 // my brother and i, rio de janeiro,
brasil, march 2003



JW, gray's papaya, february 2003 // JW, me, and mike, retro party,
astoria, april 2003



fulminous, retro party, astoria, april 2003 // stephanie at the high line,
chelsea, july 2003



kate and i, rockefeller center, october 2003 // shiv and ful, halloween,
october 2003



jason and i, halloween 2003 // the troika, christmas party, december 2003



happiest new year, everyone. now go get drunk.

love, krissa .... 11:24 AM ... link!

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