First posts are always a tad awkward aren’t they?
Especially when one doesn’t know exactly how to introduce themselves, let alone what they are writing about. I would hardly call myself a blogger (yet) and I am not entirely sure how to describe the purpose of this blog, since my hope is that it will help anyone reading as much as it helps me to write it.
It has taking me a rather long time to accept the fact that if I am not necessarily exceptional, I am rather unusual. My parents were from very different backgrounds (Russian and Jewish/WASP and military), and tried to give me a solid grounding in each, with varying degrees of success. I also grew up in America but went to college in the UK, and still use a lot of British-isms in my day to day conversation, seven years later. We also traveled a lot as a family while I was in middle school and high school, which helped me to develop an awareness of other cultural norms and expectations early on.
Recently, I married J, a wonderful man who inspires me on a daily basis to be the best version of myself. His family is from Kerala, a small state on the southwest coast of India, but he grew up in the North, in Punjab, so he is also a bi-cultural kid like me. He is also the person who helped me realize how important communication is, and how even two people who understand each other intimately and share a common verbal language can still struggle to effectively communicate. So many cues and references we assume are common place turn out to be completely alien to someone else. Verbal cues (and especially non-verbal ones) can get completely lost in translation through someone else’s cultural lens.
Most recently, we decided to spend three months in India to see if we could feel comfortable living here for multiple years at a time. In fact, this blog post is coming to you from my in-law’s dining room table, under the gentle if irritating whir of the fan (don’t worry, I will elaborate on my love-hate relationship with fans at some point). My hope is that this blog will not only help me, in chronicling and reflecting on my cross-cultural adventures, but will also help others who are grappling with living with a different cultural language.
Thank you for stopping by, and I hope you will follow along on my journey to Cultural Fluency!