Kill yourself.

I've recently come to a realization on my journey to adapt to Colombian culture: I need to kill myself. No, no, no. I don't mean commit physical suicide but instead to commit suicide of the ego. Yeah, I know, so obvious, right? But it's one thing to understand this in words, as an intellectual concept, and another to know it by experiencing it. It’s like how I can tell you that in the vacuum of space no one can hear you scream and you get the idea, but you don't really get it until you're there, in a space suit, faced with an unspeakable horror that’s hungry for some hoomunn in its tum-tum.

Where is the tum-tum on this thing exactly?

Since the madness that was studying for the TCF has stopped, I've slowly been working back into a steady meditation schedule. I knew since I arrived that this was something I had to make time for more than ever, and at first, I did. But as life often gets in the way of life, it fell by the wayside in between the traveling, the four hours a day studying French, and the time consuming efforts of simply being a stranger in a strange land. But now that I've taken that test (and did better than I ever expected!), I'm free, and it’s time for it to become a priority again.

Meditation has always helped keep my mind in order. I have a tendency to overpower myself with my own thoughts: I create arguments in my head, relive memories (both pleasant and unpleasant), and can even sometimes experience psychosomatic pain if I imagine a potential injury too vividly. In short, my imagination is hardcore powerful, yo.

Unspeakable horrors await you in that darkened and forlorn place ...

This has its upsides. A powerful imagination leads itself to creativity and innovation, to storytelling and theatrics, to solutions for problems in life. The downside is that sometimes it can have a life of its own. When I started meditating, it became easier to see thoughts for what they are: They are to the brain as beats are to the heart. They have only as much substance as I give them, and their illusions are broken once you see what’s underneath them.

So what does this all have to do with overcoming culture shock? Well, since I’ve been meditating more, I’ve started to see through some of these recurring thoughts patterns. I’ve realized that a lot of these thoughts come from a place of, dare I say, entitlement. For example, when I’m walking down the street, and a group of people are coming the other way, I expect them to move to one half of the sidewalk so I can pass. This would be considered the well-mannered thing to do in the US. For the record, I think it’s considered the well-mannered thing to do here too, but the social pressure to do it seems a lot less. This desire and my subsequent anger or annoyance (whose severity depending on the day, weather, and whether the other person was cute or not) comes from a place of expecting them to do it, as if it were somehow unequivocally written into the fabric of the universe that people should move to let others pass. But there’s nothing there. There’s nothing that says that people have to or even should move for me. What objective means is there to say that they should move rather than I should wait? It’s nice that people do it, but no one says that they must. (Alternatively, no one says that you must take that exact path every day either.) How are these things decided other than by cultural norms, which ultimately are just patterns that emerged over time? The pattern to move out of the way when someone comes toward you showed a strong winning in the United States. In Colombia, not so much. And that simple is how the arepa de choclo crumbles

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I’m doing my best to start to see things this way, to realize that what’s conscientious and mannerly to me has little to do with any sort of logic and all to do with the commonly accepted patterns of behavior in the United States. This is an imperfect process. I’m still not there. I still feel a very vivid mix of frustration, anger, and disillusionment when Colombians cancel plans an hour before we’re supposed to meet, show up an hour or two late without phoning or even just don’t show up at all. And believe me, I’d like to. This is probably the single biggest barrier to my making friends here because for me, the disrespect I see this as is nearly intolerable. But here, it’s not disrespectful; it’s normal. It’s how life works. And my choices are to poison myself with anger or take up the opportunity to cut through another layer of ego as I search for my original face.