Since I've been open and frank about other people, it seems only fair that I be open and frank about myself. There are some things that I just never talk about and haven't talked about for years.
Twenty four years to be exact.
I'm going to talk about my exchange. You see when I was a teenager, about 16, I was taking French and decided that I wanted to go to France during the school's three week exchange program that would take place the next year. My grandfather thought it was nonsense.
He never did anything halfway and thought I should go for a year long exchange and he conveniently was chairing the board of directors for an exchange program. I went ahead and applied, going through the process without any extra help from my inside contact. I was accepted to go to Brazil.
I was thrilled, my grandfather wasn't.
So he took matters into his own hands and changed my country to Sweden. I was surprised and a little put out but Sweden it was.
During the interview process, I made a big point of saying how important my faith is, and in retrospect, this was a mistake. An LDS family decided that they should have me when they really shouldn't have ever taken an exchange student, you see, they didn't like Americans. They thought that since I was also LDS, and we shared that, we would have some kind of instant bond.
When I traveled to Sweden, both for my exchange and for mission I suffered extreme jet lag. Mind bending jet lag that left me awake at four in the morning and falling asleep in the middle of the day. My host family was on vacation up north, side note, I got to ride my bike over the border and spent about five minutes in Finland.
I was jet lagged, often falling asleep and I guess because I wasn't ooohing and aaaaahing while jumping up and down (I was tired) my host parents decided that I wasn't really interested in Swedish.
Languages are also a challenge for me. I didn't realize this when I was a teenager, but I have a bit of my mom's learning disability. For me, it comes out in the form of memorization. I have an extremely difficult time memorizing, so of course, words, grammar rules, it takes an insane amount of repetition for me to recall pretty much anything.
This didn't effect me in school as much as it did my mom and does my girls now, for whatever reason, possibly a combination of not having the comprehension problems they have and really good critical thinking skills but regardless, when I was given words, I had a terrible time recalling them. My host parents decided I was not only uninterested in Sweden but I was also lazy.
Nice.
Their experience with Americans learning languages was strictly with LDS missionaries. There are several differences between serving a mission and going to high school. The very first difference is that when you're a missionary, you get spiritual help in speaking a foreign language. Some might call this nonsense but having been a missionary, I can say from my own experience that this is true, I have received spiritual help, finding words I didn't know and a fluency I hadn't yet learned when I needed to share my love and understanding of my Savior, Jesus Christ.
It's a very different experience going to the Swedish equivalent of high school with teenagers that mostly wanted to share their knowledge of American profanity.
Not to mention English was "cool" and Swedish was "boring" to quote every teenage Swede I've ever talked with. It was difficult to learn a language with peers that had no desire to speak to me in that language.
I tried to fit in. I pretended to understand and here lies the great and terrible mistake that labeled me for the remaining ten months I was in that house. I'm pretty embarrassed actually. Even after all these years.
We were eating dinner and had company over, a mother and her teenage daughter. They were super nice and I really liked them. I couldn't understand anything, all the talking was so incredibly fast. Trying to fit in, I picked points in the conversation and pretended that I understood and laughed.
What's so bad about that? I didn't find out until I was asked to leave that home after the end of a very tense school year with horrible, awful misunderstandings that happened over and over again. It all started with that laugh during dinner.
I have an ability, a gift if you will. Its often revealed to me during conversations some specific insights to the situation. About one month before I was suppose to go home, one of my host siblings has a sports event in Stockholm. I was under the impression that we were all going and was extremely disappointed when I woke up and realized most of the family had left without me. Only my host mother was home and she invited me for a walk together.
So I went with her. During that walk, she basically beat me down, listing all my awful faults and what a horrible person I was. Specifically she told me that I was lazy, not learning Swedish like I should, I was unkind, oh the list went on. Then she told me the only two good things she saw in me was that I went to church every Sunday. She let me know that they believed that because I was American, I wouldn't be as faithful. The second thing was that I had such a good relationship with my father, which was a hysterical observation because while my exchange opened the door for the start of a wonderful relationship with my dad, that relationship wasn't in place during my exchange.
She also asked me what I would think if someone laughed during a story where a child was viciously bit by a dog, what kind of person would do that. My gift at work, I instantly understood, with that dinner party pictured in my mind, in my efforts to fit in, I had done just the opposite. *I* was the one that had laughed during a story told by the wonderful lady visiting that evening about an awful childhood injury.
I had no idea that I had set the gears in motion for not trusting me the rest of the time I was in their home. I had no idea I had hurt someone that I admired. That they thought I was cruel, odd, weird and who knows what else.
So why am I sharing now? I'd like to think that I'm grown up enough to admit my mistakes, even if it is 24 years later. Don't feel bad for me though. Compassion and empathy are words that I've learned to embrace along with the life lesson of never trying to be more of anything then who I really am.
So if I give you a completely confused look, it's because I really am confused. I'm pretty sure if you've met me in real life, you've seen it.
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