My family is unmovable, and coming home shows that it is my people that are their own force. I hadn’t realized how much of myself I’d forgotten by taking my family for granted, and to be completely honest I hadn’t realized the full extent of which I was taking those people for granted.
Amman teems with a stubborn will to continue, and this is probably the natural state of things for most people, but there is something stoney and unstoppable about the cooperative way people can drive here so haphazardly and so rarely cause pileups, there is a will in the way that you speak in the same tone and words to strangers that you do your family, there is a trust in the air that is intangible and likely unnoticed by those living here because it is the natural state of things.
Everything here feels close, but from what I’ve asked about, that proximity might be to compensate for the rarity of hope. It is undeniably hard here to step outside of your roles, I have never felt so automatically categorized for my gender as I have this week. Self expression here has a limited place, because really who you are in your personal life rarely actually affects how you work and how you work here is so much more important than who you are.
The west may tout mobility and individuality, but to see in practice a state where these priorities are shifted to state solidarity and family togetherness through diligence really drives home for me how different and big the world has the potential to be.
To homogenize places like this is to limit the scope of human potential, because I’m only beginning to grasp how different things can be among different people.
Garbanzo Bae 