There’s a certain point in any foreign experience when a person hits a certain peak. The awkwardness of the new situation has worn off, for the most part, and while things are still new, they’ve also reached a point of comfort where you feel like you can be yourself. You, in turn, are a new experience to the other people involved in this foreign environment, which can in turn itself be kind of eye-opening.<\/p>\n
This is the point I remember feeling, at one point in France. This is the feeling I had freshman year at Evergreen. It’s even the feeling I had when I came back to Olympia, both times, from France and Ohio, though in those cases there was an interesting blend of newness and familiarity. It’s the point that, in no small part, drove me to Montreal. It’s a point of self-discovery, or maybe of re-discovery of those parts of yourself that you love best. When we exist in an environment that is used to us, it’s inevitable that it will start to take us for granted, and that we in turn will take ourselves for granted. In a new environment, we’re fresh; we’re seen through new eyes and can therefore see ourselves through new eyes.<\/p>\n
In these brief flashes of insight I’m a poet in love with the world; I want to dance at midnight, drink coffee ’til dawn; I want to improvise pirate stories by flashlight around a bottle of whiskey. I want to smile, I want to cry, and I want to laugh out loud at the complicated, perfect beauty of the world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
There’s a certain point in any foreign experience when a person hits a certain peak. The awkwardness of the new situation has worn off, for the most part, and while things are still new, they’ve also reached a point of comfort where you feel like you can be yourself. You, in turn, are a new […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ahniwa.com\/old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/498"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ahniwa.com\/old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ahniwa.com\/old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ahniwa.com\/old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ahniwa.com\/old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=498"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ahniwa.com\/old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/498\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ahniwa.com\/old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=498"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ahniwa.com\/old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=498"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ahniwa.com\/old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=498"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}