Limbo Period

Now that I'm back from Honduras, things have been somewhat transitionary...and confusing...

I did really well for the first 2 weeks in terms of culture shock. Got through family vacations, worked my way up to going to the grocery store and malls...I figured I could make the transition okay as long as I worked my way into American culture little by little. And I did well...until that one moment in Talbots when I went with my mom to get a petite button up shirt that would fit me for my birthday...and it just took me by surprise, after all I thought I was doing well! The pricetag showing the equivalent of a third of my worker's monthly salary...the fact that I was buying the perfect petite button up shirt that fit me by height and bust so that I would look impeccably put together mixed with visions of Dona Perse in her "sexy" (yet entirely way too tight and certainly not "tailored to fit") sequence red dress matched with black heels 2 sizes too big. It hit me hard, unexpectedly, and I left the store in tears while my mom paid the birthday bill. I felt terrible for making her feel bad, and for probably making the retail ladies feel really uncomfortable. But, the tears had to come sometime...and they weren't just tears of "culture shock." They were tears of letting go, of recognizing where my next step might or might not be, of cherishing a time of my life in which I encountered faces and voices different from my own, of trying to cope with a bitter understanding of the realities of this world, and of struggling to define and discern the overlap in my own juxtapositional reality.