Some of the Downside of Living Alone in a Foreign Country

It can be incredibly lonely. Chiang Mai is a waypoint for tourists doing longer treks through the north. So the English-speaking population in this city is for the most part transient, and several interesting friend-candidates have all moved on before we had a chance to meet up more than a few times. And my Thai is not good enough to foray blindly into social situations.

It was a stark discovery for me to realize that the language that I have spent my entire life practicing, and the language that I devoted my major in college to, can only take me a short way here. I spend a lot of my day wrapped up in a kind of restless energy that comes, I think, from constantly having to edit my English to make it more understandable to non-native speakers, or else translate that English into miserable Thai.

At home I can be articulate, funny, serious, academic with carefully worded sentences that I don't even really need to think about. Here I speak to people in my broken Thai and simplified English and feel like there are whole parts of my personality that I am just not able to express. How can they really know me if I can't communicate any complexity of emotion or critical thought? I can only talk about what they talk to every tourist about- the food, the weather, basic greetings. Much of what I like best about myself, my facility with my native tongue and the person that allows me to become, is just not available to me here.