Back!

Back to blogging. Where I was? Partially I was quite busy at school. The teaching position was a great experience and the best moment of it came when I read evaluations. I was amazed by concrete approval and encouragements of my students. It rarely happens to me: I felt I did it quite good!

But there was a more important factor that is some how related to what's coming next: I wrote this note last week, but didn't get to finish it:

"For the first time in my life, today I went to a counseling session in my school. Series of emotional and personal problems exist in my current state of mind that made me encouraged to talk to a psychologist. The problems are mainly related to my personal interactions with people. A sense of inability to reach people and build friendly relationships beyond the surface level. After 10 years of living in America, still I see myself incapable of bridging to Americans and go beyond the polite and politically correct interactions. And this sense has been added up to a state that I feel is making me constantly unhappy. And I was becoming concerned that this might affect my domestic life and my dearest friend too. Anyway, I finally decided to give it a chance today. It's some an odd situation that you walk to someone and after the initial introduction you start talking about personal matters."

And here I continue:

Now after three sessions, I feel more comfortable with my counselor. In these first few sessions, I have been trying to give her a compact view of myself, my background and my feelings and still I'm not done. It's a very strange connection. Some time I feel very frustrated. I tell myself, what you're doing is something that you should do with friends. But the problem is that those trustful friends who can patiently listen to me and give me feedback, are not quite often. Maybe this is a problem with immigrants like me who have practically been far from their elder family members. Parents, uncles, aunts and cousins! Yes, living abroad has many advantages and one of them is the sense of privacy that you gain by being far from eastern family relationships. But at the same time, you hardly have mature people who can give you strong point of view of life and emotional matters. In these diasporic life style, I constantly deal with people of my own age with similar problems that it's tough to open up the depth of my thoughts and views to them. Part of it is the trust factor: I'm not sure if the other side really understand me and is capable of giving me intelligent feedback. The other part of it is the shallowness of relationships. I keep dealing with short term friendships. People come and leave quickly. You get friend with someone and they leave in 6 months, 1 year for job, grad school, etc. That makes the relationships not very deep. Something that I call "Weekend friendships".

Anyway, this is a long story and I should write and discuss more in details later. I would like to discuss more of my inner side here on this blog. Maybe I can benefit from your comments and your experiences.