tamara_in_jakarta | Week 1- Someone to love you in all your damaged glory.

I am a long-term expatriate, having lived outside of the countries issuing any of my 3 passports for the majority of my life. I currently live in a dirty, crowded, sinking, megacity with terrible traffic, poor air quality and a taste among the expatriate community to love hating life here.

My apartment is large and luxurious, with an immaculate gym and pool at my disposal and a short walk to my well appointed office. I do not hate it here, not very often anyway. I have a great circle of friends, good work/life balance for the most part, and can afford to outsource the mundane tasks that lengthened my mental laundry list in "more civilized" places, whatever that may mean.

This is the sin. The locals are weird, housing is crap, traffic is terrible, schools are expensive, it’s almost impossible for an expat to get a job, there aren’t a lot of people who speak English- it is unfashionable, unfathomable, that you would make the conscious choice when waking in the morning to not actively hate where you live.

I was that person, long ago in Moscow, in another century even, so many postings back and ignorant of how good I had it, sick of the endless cold and dark of winter and the hearts of my coworkers. Nauseated by the stench of wet fur and the vodka fumes being sweat out of the pores of others when sandwiched between some random Ivan and Natasha on the endless escalator down into the metro. It’s easy to hate a place for the hard parts. Any place. It is more fun to embrace the lunacy and strap in for the ride.

Complaining is easy and entertaining, few want to hang out at the bar and listen to how delighted someone is that their cleaning lady folds all their laundry into perfect cubes and organizes their clothes by type and color. Or that mango and avocado, plentiful and cheap, left on the counter in the morning are transformed into cubes in neat boxes in the refrigerator when returning from work. Affordable massages and friendly spas are not cause for celebration. An array of world class beaches reachable for the weekend is nothing to smile about. Enjoyment is inappropriate in this place of despair, frustrating and utter different-ness. Do not love this damaged place. We did not move here to fall in love with damage, we moved for a perfect life and it has fallen short. Again.

I understand the ease of this, and the amusement that can come from it, but I no longer have the ability to wake up, choose to be unhappy every day and just survive until nightfall. So now I am boring. I am watching the distance grow between myself and old acquaintances. My willingness to just be here, to learn some new words, to laugh off feeling like a giant white monster when shopping for clothes, and to revel in the pleasures afforded here that may not be present at the next posting. I sin every day, committing myself to loving the damaged bits, making every place home instead of longing for that perfect place that may not even exist.