Its time for some real, potentially offensive, honesty, and some confessions.
If you are my immediate family or my husband you already know what I am about to confess. You will have seen me apply hand sanitizer an exorbitant amount of times in day; you will have seen me worry that the slightly red cut on my finger is absolutely an infection in need of antibiotics; you will have heard me tell you to wash off the tops of your coke cans because one time I read this one article about this one person somewhere who got sick from the bacteria on their coke can; you would have seen me wash the kitchen counter with bleach more than once if any raw meat came within two feet of it; you will have seen me refuse to touch anything in a hospital; and you certainly would have heard me nag you to wash your hands and take your vitamins and get that spot checked out at the doctor because it is most certainly a life-threatening paper cut.
I am a germ-aphobe with a healthy dose of OCD and hypochondria, and a pretty stellar imagination. Now, I don't mean to minimize the seriousness of struggling against OCD or anxiety-related conditions; they can most certainly be crippling. I have my crippling moments. But I won't pretend to understand what it is like to struggle with serious OCD or other anxieties. All I can know is my own experience.
Now, I couldn't call my anxiety about germs and sickness crippling, but it does certainly shape how I experience the world, like, for example, a trip to India. I do not have the flexibility, sense of humor and carefree nature that make journeys to new places so fun and so much easier. I am the kind of person who needs structure, control, and, well, alot of hand sanitizer. This makes India a challenge. It makes any new place a challenge, really.
A brief interlude in my confession: I want to be careful here. I don't want to paint India, or my experience here, as purely one of contending with the "dirtiness" of the place. In fact, for this very reason, I would normally hide today's story from most people because I don't want to reinforce denigrating stereotypes of India as dirty or backwards. The thing is that India, and much of the Global South, has alot more figured out than places like America. They have to not only because of the amount of people living there but also the sheer lack of resources and infrastructure, which go hand in hand with competing with the Global North for those resources and with histories of geo-political oppression. So, for example, my family is very conscious of the amount of electricity they use and are very careful to turn off things if they leave a room or aren't using it, and they produce much less trash than my American household because they buy most of their things in bulk at the market and have little need for packaging. At the mall they have motion-sensitive escalators that stop if no one is using them, as it saves electricity, and they don't waste a bazillion gallons (or however much I use each year) of perfectly good drinking water for their bath water (it now seems strange that we do this in the States when water is so precious...but that's just my self-righteous rant). So, when I talk about the challenges of India, I don't mean to say that India is "backwards", I just mean that its outside of my comfort zone, and full of stuff I can't control and thats the real problem. That being said, Kolkata does have flooding problems. It also has people with no home and no bathroom but the streets themselves. Moreover, the city struggles to stay on top of waste and sewage disposal. So, yeah, you're gonna run across some germs.
With my interlude in mind, I will still confess to you that even as I know, as a scholar critical of neo-colonial discourses, that I'm not supposed to be afraid of India or buy into the discourses that paint it as backwards and dirty, in my heart of hearts, if I am being totally honest, India freaks my shit out. I totally love it, and am thankful everyday for this opportunity, but it is WAY outside my comfort zone. Thus, I have totally bought into all those warnings that I roll my eyes at when someone else says them: "India is dirty", "You'll get sick", "Someone I knew knew someone who died there". Even as I roll my eyes at the things I have been taught not to say, there is always a part of me that feels the same way-- that just wants my sanitized and comfortable and privileged American bedroom, set far away from mosquitoes and monsoon floods. I'm not supposed to say such things as a scholar of South Asia. But I'm not speaking as a scholar. I'm speaking as a broken, foolish, weak and anxious human.
So as I prepared for my trip, I packed all kinds of products to keep my everyday in India as sanitized as possible: rubbing alcohol, neosporin, aloe vera, hand sanitizer, vitamins, probiotics, and countless antibiotics, tissues, soaps etc. Moreover, my everyday routine involves an admittedly exhausting process of sanitizing my world so I feel like it is "clean" enough to be safe for my existence.
Of course, for me, all of this is about control and faith.
Any time we leave our normal surroundings, we lose the control (or at least the facade of control) that we so carefully construct in our everyday. And for me, India offers plenty of challenges to the way I try to control and sanitize my world. I will admit that some days it feels overwhelming, and just plain scary.
But here's the thing: I'm not really ever in control. I mean, yes, I can wash my hands and drink bottled water. But the fact is that the world (not just new worlds or "third worlds") offers a whole slew of things I cannot control. If I, like the AA motto reminds me, recognize that which I can't control and stop trying to control those things, life could be alot more enjoyable.
Life is always a gift, and one we, for the most, part lack control in.
We are fragile and broken beings and every day we wake up it is a miracle. Beautiful baby Jack reminds me everyday that simply being born is a miracle and not one to take for granted. Every breath is a miracle. Every thing seen, every touch felt, every taste tasted, every person met, every place visited, is an event that some have never enjoyed on this Earth.
But, regrettably, my everyday is filled with my own forgetting to enjoy each moment. Instead, I worry and fret and hurry around trying to keep my life controlled and sanitized, and miss so much beauty in the process.
Kolkata sent me a reminder of this today. It is monsoon season and today it flooded. Nothing dangerous or tragic like North India is facing. Just a nuisance. But to my germaphobe, control freak self, I looked at that water and all I could see was "skin infection".
But as I watched people travel through the water, I saw a few different approaches to the flood: school children held hands and laughed at the chaos of knee deep water; women in saris piled high on a rickshaw and laughed hysterically as they tried not to fall out; Kolkata police and the neighborhood elders crowd around a tea stall and enjoy a snack as they stand in the water and direct traffic; kids (with absolutely absurdly strong immune systems) swim in the water. Now I'm not saying everybody was having a great time or that Kolkata loves the floods. On the contrary its a pain in the ass. It takes longer to get home, your clothes and shoes get soaked, and pretty much everyone knows that if you are lucky enough to have a bathroom and soap, you ought to take a bath after your walk home because, yes, you really can get a skin infection. But there was still so much laughter.
I understood this for myself as I prepared to walk in the water. We were given a ride home (we are SO pampered at AIIS), but in order to get into the car in the drive way, you had to wade through the water in the courtyard. I will never forget that moment: my feet dry, my legs clean, my world sanitized so carefully, staring at the black water, about to wash away all my work of controlling and sanitizing. In that moment, you hold back. You stop yourself. You just can't take that first step. But at some point, there's just no other choice. There's only one way to get home, and that's to get into the water. So you do it. And you do it with everyone else, realizing that there is a whole city of people around you for whom this is just the everyday, and that your little inner crisis is not worth the attention you are giving to it. And in that moment, you are free because there ain't nothing you can do but get into the water. You're gonna get shit on you (literally....there was a diaper floating in the water), but if you have no choice, there is a kind of freedom. You don't have to control anything anymore.
All you can do is laugh.
Well, laugh, and pray.
This is the other piece of the puzzle. Its not just giving up control that is hard. Its giving control up to God, in faith. Its being ok with the fact that God (and not you) is in control. Its having faith in God's faithfulness to you. That's the really hard part, especially for a worrier like me.
In one of my favorite bible verses (Matthew 6:25-34--the inspirational verse for this blog's name) Jesus reminds his followers that they need not worry about even the basics of life not only because God's got it covered, but also because worrying doesn't do a damn thing except take the fun out of life and distract you. This is a beautiful and important reminder for me. Its also one more easily said than believed and followed. It is difficult to have faith that God is in control, especially when we are scared; we like to think we are better at controlling it, or at least more immediately at work at doing so.
Although today's little experience was enlightening and, for a moment, freeing, I still sit in my bedroom with the worry in the back of my mind that I will get sick or hurt or worse while I am far from home; that today's adventure means a skin infection tomorrow. But if it does, worrying about it won't change a thing, except give me an anxiety attack, and blockade my enjoyment of the world around me and the adventure God is taking me on.
I don't close this blog with any suggestion that I am somehow "over" being the worrying, anxious control freak (I am rubbing neosporin on my legs as we speak...). I will still pray each day for God's protection. Those fears are deep within me and hard to root out. But for a second today I learned a little about the joy and love that comes with giving up control to God long enough to laugh along with him.
I hope I can better learn to laugh like those school kids wading in the water today. May God's peace and joy be with you and may you believe that "God sends his love and his faithfulness" (Psalm 57:3).
Keep the prayers a comin' y'all. I feel you with me every day and in every step of water.
love and blessings
If you are my immediate family or my husband you already know what I am about to confess. You will have seen me apply hand sanitizer an exorbitant amount of times in day; you will have seen me worry that the slightly red cut on my finger is absolutely an infection in need of antibiotics; you will have heard me tell you to wash off the tops of your coke cans because one time I read this one article about this one person somewhere who got sick from the bacteria on their coke can; you would have seen me wash the kitchen counter with bleach more than once if any raw meat came within two feet of it; you will have seen me refuse to touch anything in a hospital; and you certainly would have heard me nag you to wash your hands and take your vitamins and get that spot checked out at the doctor because it is most certainly a life-threatening paper cut.
I am a germ-aphobe with a healthy dose of OCD and hypochondria, and a pretty stellar imagination. Now, I don't mean to minimize the seriousness of struggling against OCD or anxiety-related conditions; they can most certainly be crippling. I have my crippling moments. But I won't pretend to understand what it is like to struggle with serious OCD or other anxieties. All I can know is my own experience.
Now, I couldn't call my anxiety about germs and sickness crippling, but it does certainly shape how I experience the world, like, for example, a trip to India. I do not have the flexibility, sense of humor and carefree nature that make journeys to new places so fun and so much easier. I am the kind of person who needs structure, control, and, well, alot of hand sanitizer. This makes India a challenge. It makes any new place a challenge, really.
A brief interlude in my confession: I want to be careful here. I don't want to paint India, or my experience here, as purely one of contending with the "dirtiness" of the place. In fact, for this very reason, I would normally hide today's story from most people because I don't want to reinforce denigrating stereotypes of India as dirty or backwards. The thing is that India, and much of the Global South, has alot more figured out than places like America. They have to not only because of the amount of people living there but also the sheer lack of resources and infrastructure, which go hand in hand with competing with the Global North for those resources and with histories of geo-political oppression. So, for example, my family is very conscious of the amount of electricity they use and are very careful to turn off things if they leave a room or aren't using it, and they produce much less trash than my American household because they buy most of their things in bulk at the market and have little need for packaging. At the mall they have motion-sensitive escalators that stop if no one is using them, as it saves electricity, and they don't waste a bazillion gallons (or however much I use each year) of perfectly good drinking water for their bath water (it now seems strange that we do this in the States when water is so precious...but that's just my self-righteous rant). So, when I talk about the challenges of India, I don't mean to say that India is "backwards", I just mean that its outside of my comfort zone, and full of stuff I can't control and thats the real problem. That being said, Kolkata does have flooding problems. It also has people with no home and no bathroom but the streets themselves. Moreover, the city struggles to stay on top of waste and sewage disposal. So, yeah, you're gonna run across some germs.
With my interlude in mind, I will still confess to you that even as I know, as a scholar critical of neo-colonial discourses, that I'm not supposed to be afraid of India or buy into the discourses that paint it as backwards and dirty, in my heart of hearts, if I am being totally honest, India freaks my shit out. I totally love it, and am thankful everyday for this opportunity, but it is WAY outside my comfort zone. Thus, I have totally bought into all those warnings that I roll my eyes at when someone else says them: "India is dirty", "You'll get sick", "Someone I knew knew someone who died there". Even as I roll my eyes at the things I have been taught not to say, there is always a part of me that feels the same way-- that just wants my sanitized and comfortable and privileged American bedroom, set far away from mosquitoes and monsoon floods. I'm not supposed to say such things as a scholar of South Asia. But I'm not speaking as a scholar. I'm speaking as a broken, foolish, weak and anxious human.
So as I prepared for my trip, I packed all kinds of products to keep my everyday in India as sanitized as possible: rubbing alcohol, neosporin, aloe vera, hand sanitizer, vitamins, probiotics, and countless antibiotics, tissues, soaps etc. Moreover, my everyday routine involves an admittedly exhausting process of sanitizing my world so I feel like it is "clean" enough to be safe for my existence.
Of course, for me, all of this is about control and faith.
Any time we leave our normal surroundings, we lose the control (or at least the facade of control) that we so carefully construct in our everyday. And for me, India offers plenty of challenges to the way I try to control and sanitize my world. I will admit that some days it feels overwhelming, and just plain scary.
But here's the thing: I'm not really ever in control. I mean, yes, I can wash my hands and drink bottled water. But the fact is that the world (not just new worlds or "third worlds") offers a whole slew of things I cannot control. If I, like the AA motto reminds me, recognize that which I can't control and stop trying to control those things, life could be alot more enjoyable.
Life is always a gift, and one we, for the most, part lack control in.
We are fragile and broken beings and every day we wake up it is a miracle. Beautiful baby Jack reminds me everyday that simply being born is a miracle and not one to take for granted. Every breath is a miracle. Every thing seen, every touch felt, every taste tasted, every person met, every place visited, is an event that some have never enjoyed on this Earth.
But, regrettably, my everyday is filled with my own forgetting to enjoy each moment. Instead, I worry and fret and hurry around trying to keep my life controlled and sanitized, and miss so much beauty in the process.
Kolkata sent me a reminder of this today. It is monsoon season and today it flooded. Nothing dangerous or tragic like North India is facing. Just a nuisance. But to my germaphobe, control freak self, I looked at that water and all I could see was "skin infection".
But as I watched people travel through the water, I saw a few different approaches to the flood: school children held hands and laughed at the chaos of knee deep water; women in saris piled high on a rickshaw and laughed hysterically as they tried not to fall out; Kolkata police and the neighborhood elders crowd around a tea stall and enjoy a snack as they stand in the water and direct traffic; kids (with absolutely absurdly strong immune systems) swim in the water. Now I'm not saying everybody was having a great time or that Kolkata loves the floods. On the contrary its a pain in the ass. It takes longer to get home, your clothes and shoes get soaked, and pretty much everyone knows that if you are lucky enough to have a bathroom and soap, you ought to take a bath after your walk home because, yes, you really can get a skin infection. But there was still so much laughter.
I understood this for myself as I prepared to walk in the water. We were given a ride home (we are SO pampered at AIIS), but in order to get into the car in the drive way, you had to wade through the water in the courtyard. I will never forget that moment: my feet dry, my legs clean, my world sanitized so carefully, staring at the black water, about to wash away all my work of controlling and sanitizing. In that moment, you hold back. You stop yourself. You just can't take that first step. But at some point, there's just no other choice. There's only one way to get home, and that's to get into the water. So you do it. And you do it with everyone else, realizing that there is a whole city of people around you for whom this is just the everyday, and that your little inner crisis is not worth the attention you are giving to it. And in that moment, you are free because there ain't nothing you can do but get into the water. You're gonna get shit on you (literally....there was a diaper floating in the water), but if you have no choice, there is a kind of freedom. You don't have to control anything anymore.
 |
| The spaceman in the helmet is the Kolkata Police enjoying a snack at the stall |
All you can do is laugh.
Well, laugh, and pray.
This is the other piece of the puzzle. Its not just giving up control that is hard. Its giving control up to God, in faith. Its being ok with the fact that God (and not you) is in control. Its having faith in God's faithfulness to you. That's the really hard part, especially for a worrier like me.
In one of my favorite bible verses (Matthew 6:25-34--the inspirational verse for this blog's name) Jesus reminds his followers that they need not worry about even the basics of life not only because God's got it covered, but also because worrying doesn't do a damn thing except take the fun out of life and distract you. This is a beautiful and important reminder for me. Its also one more easily said than believed and followed. It is difficult to have faith that God is in control, especially when we are scared; we like to think we are better at controlling it, or at least more immediately at work at doing so.
Although today's little experience was enlightening and, for a moment, freeing, I still sit in my bedroom with the worry in the back of my mind that I will get sick or hurt or worse while I am far from home; that today's adventure means a skin infection tomorrow. But if it does, worrying about it won't change a thing, except give me an anxiety attack, and blockade my enjoyment of the world around me and the adventure God is taking me on.
I don't close this blog with any suggestion that I am somehow "over" being the worrying, anxious control freak (I am rubbing neosporin on my legs as we speak...). I will still pray each day for God's protection. Those fears are deep within me and hard to root out. But for a second today I learned a little about the joy and love that comes with giving up control to God long enough to laugh along with him.
I hope I can better learn to laugh like those school kids wading in the water today. May God's peace and joy be with you and may you believe that "God sends his love and his faithfulness" (Psalm 57:3).
Keep the prayers a comin' y'all. I feel you with me every day and in every step of water.
love and blessings
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