Nothing Exotic Here

what i’m learning

Writing this newsletter has made me more mindful of just how many hours I spend working for my job. It doesn’t leave room for much else in my life and begs the question of what I think about it and what I’m willing to do about it.

In the same vein, I’m starting to be more mindful of what I do with the time I have when not working; how much of it is escapism, how much is recovering from overworking and exhaustion, and how much of it is actually me living my life intentionally and being the person I want to be. Because we only have this one and I definitely don’t optimize it in the ways that I would like to. Why do I spend so much time optimizing at work but so little optimizing my own life? So, I’m doing a lot of learning right now about my patterns of behaviour and thinking; a self-assessment, basically, though more in the data-gathering stage than actual analytics right now.

what i’m thinking

I’m thinking a lot about the concept of “exotic” in people’s minds lately. About how surprised and dismayed I was to first be perceived as being exotic (for my foreignness) and later, to be dismissed for not going on to lead an “exotic lifestyle” that others had anticipated for me. I remember how many unsolicited remarks I received from people around me, people I had respected, questioning my choice to live in that local place, or asking why wasn’t I off doing something remarkable in an exotic corner of the world, and informing me that I was utterly wasting my talents and unique background with what I had chosen to do and where I had chosen to be instead.

They were all so upset and puzzled that I’d chosen to stay in a small town in a rural area in the United States doing very local work when of all people they’d expect me, a born international, to be living it up all around the world and doing great things (great things can only be done elsewhere?). My decision was apparently incomprehensible.

I found it impossible to help them understand that where I had chosen to live and what I had chosen to do was, in fact, very unique and foreign and terrifying for me, and that “local” and “exotic” as they used them are very relative descriptors.

Now, living in Cambodia, I’m finally back in a space where I feel comfortable again. Living here is an intensely familiar and safe feeling to me—not because of the country itself, which is entirely new to me, but because of my relation to it. Here I am still living in a new-to-me country (as with the USA), but here I am also no longer a hidden immigrant but an exposed one – and, in fact, one of the privileged ones, who gets to be referred to as an “expat.” (Think about the differences between people who temporarily live in a different country and are called expats vs those who temporarily live in a different country and are labeled migrant workers). And while it’s a very different space than I’ve lived in before, it is very much simply itself in interesting and sometimes beautiful or uncomfortable new ways—just like everywhere else I’ve lived before has been. I’m doing the same work, I’m still living a very local life, and it just happens to be lived in a globalish, connectedish world.

I used to think, when people threw the word “exotic” as a descriptor for the foreign places they imagined me into, about how that never works if you actually live in a place. “Exotic” is almost more of a fetishization of “the other” rather than a genuine appreciation or understanding of differences. “Exotic” in this regard is not inclusive. It draws firm “us vs. that” lines and it so often objectifies – and dehumanizes – instead of respecting and allowing for equality. (And I’m not even going to get into being seen myself as “exotic” and how that objectification feels.)

I used to say then and still hold now that no matter where in the world you go, your life is always local. You can move somewhere you thought of as “exotic” but if you truly live there, if you live there well, it will quickly become non-exotic—and not because it isn’t amazing or fantastic or different than you have previously experienced, or because you made it through the transition and “that honeymoon period is over,” but because it never was “exotic” in the first place. That was just a state of mind and an outside misperception rather than reality. It isn’t and cannot be lived. You can only be here, which is local. You only have your local, lived-in life. Maybe it was only exotic because it wasn’t known to you, so you perceived it as outside life and then objectified it in order to make sense of it or have a sense of control or order in relation to it.

Last night, sipping chardonnay, surrounded by quiet chatter in a handful of different languages, awash in the succulence of smooth jazz with a balmy breeze keeping the heat at bay and hinting of tobacco and perfume; the velvet of my dress and the laughter with friends and then the dancing all while drifting down the Tonle Sap river on a gently rolling boat under the silver sliver of a crescent moon and a slightly cloudy night; that was magnificent. Intensely memorable. It was such a true jazz feeling to it I could almost wrap up in the memory for how tangible it felt in the moment. Then my eye caught just off to the side of the band; a father kneeling with a little girl (maybe four years old) on his knee, her eyes huge and riveted on the sparkling, fringe flying, crooning lead singer as she sang her heart out into this old-fashioned looking silver mic with the gorgeously wailing instruments swaying away deep in song behind and around her. The little girl sitting there tucked into the man’s shoulder with her little arm around his neck but otherwise perfectly straight, enraptured and captured by the music in the moment, absolutely transported.

And that’s what got me thinking about this concept of exotic again. Because the whole evening felt so resplendent. Because it felt outside of time. Because of the magical otherworldly quality of it all. And if exotic can be something good, can be pulled back from a dehumanizing, objectifying, fetishizing way of thinking, then perhaps what it can be is an introduction to wonder; and an invitation to expand oneself. A gateway to a greater self. The pure wonder of musical enchantment introducing a whole new world. The terrifying exhilaration of not knowing the steps to a dance and stepping out anyway to embrace not knowing and learn something new and perfectly marvelous. Something that is so far outside of our experiences and imagination that it is not an object in itself but a portal to an expanded version of ourselves, the abrupt ending of ourselves as we knew us and the transformation into something newer, something enriched and better for it. The incandescence not of discovery itself, but of how that discovery can take us beyond the narrow boundaries of our being and into a newer, expanded and expanding version of ourselves—until even in our little mortal shells we can somehow hold (though not possess) the vast wonder and mystery of the universe.

It’s something to wonder about, at least…and I’m sure I will keep turning this over and over again in my mind along with that burning memory of last night.

This post is a snippet from a newsletter I originally published on Substack. You can read the rest of the publication there.