Being the Other

 Being the Other

 

“The whole sense of the ubiquitous myth of the hero’s passage is that it shall serve as a general pattern for men and women…Therefore it is formulated in the broadest terms. The individual has only to discover his own position with reference to this general human formula, and let it then assist him past his restricting walls. Who and where are his ogres?” (Campbell 101).

Campbell, Joseph. The Hero With a Thousand Faces. 3rd ed. Novato, California: New World Library, 1949. Print.

 

    From the day I was born my life was defined by a predetermined script. A series of international moves, 3 a.m. facetime calls from Afghanistan, and never being able to pay for gas because I never could remember what my current zip code was. It was a life where an alarm clock wasn’t needed because the roar of F-16s flying overhead at 6 am was loud enough to wake anyone up, and a life where I never knew what to answer to the question ‘where are you from?’ – truth is I still don’t know how to answer that one. Regardless of experience or situation or question though, central to everything growing up was change. Change was, and always has been, my most abundant of resources. It is what I most frequently have considered to be the greatest source of stability in my life - I know, rather oxymoronic. But because of this, moving to Germany in January was something I was not very much daunted by. However, after being here for some time now, I fear I was far off in that assumption.

    You’ll have to forgive me for while I had every intent of writing more consistently, daily even, life has a tendency to move pretty quickly here. The best I could do most days was quickly jot a bullet pointed list of my day while on a train back home to Bonn or on the bus back from school. I wish you could see the notes app in my phone – it is riddled with short stories, random thoughts, and commentary on my experiences over the past 5 months. So much has happened, there is so much to write about, but for now, let’s start from the beginning.

    I came to Germany confident my time here would be no different than all the other times I was the new kid, at a new school, in a new country. I was wrong. This time around I am entirely alone, distant from the typical community I am surrounded by when living internationally. This time around I had real relationships and friendships stateside I needed to maintain. This time around I do not look the part; I do not speak the language. I do not know the culture; I do not fit the role. I am uncomfortable and, as much as I hate to say it, terribly confused a lot of times struggling to find answers. Talk about a humbling experience. From going to five different grocery stores trying to find chicken broth, to having to pay to use public bathrooms, to having to strategically plan when you are going to do laundry because it will be a week until your clothes are dry on account of us not having a dryer – even in the little things everything is different (except kids, I’ve found that no matter where you are on the globe, kids are always exactly the same). Here, I am entirely ‘the other’.

    For me, being the other looks like not knowing how to communicate to the bus driver that I’ve gotten on the wrong bus and don’t know where I am at 3am on a Thursday night after being in Germany all of 5 days. Being the other looks like the embarrassment that comes from not knowing what to do when my neighbors hand me two beers expecting me to know how to open them without a bottle opener (I have since learned this one – my new go-to party trick). Being the other looks like getting yelled at in a language you don’t understand, by a man twice your size, when you don’t even know what you did wrong (trust me – I don’t think anything is scarier of an experience than that). Being the other looks like sitting with friends as they joke and laugh and carry on in a language you don’t quite yet understand – isolated by your own lack of knowing. Being the other looks like ‘Endenicher’ sounding more like ‘in die richter’ to a taxi driver at 2am and them refusing to take you to the right destination when you realize the miscommunication that has occurred – leaving you to walk home alone in the rain after paying the taxi driver anyways.

    I am extremely grateful to have led the life of privilege that I have.  Throughout my life I have had extremely minimal experience of ever being ‘the other’ - How lucky am I that being the American girl traveling and living in Germany is the closest experience I’ve ever had to being ‘othered’. However, I know this isn’t the case for many other people. My experience as ‘the other’ is hardly comparable to the experiences of many other people. I often find myself here going about my daily routine here within Germany thinking of the marginalization we have placed on people who previously have been identified as the ‘other’. Afterall, we tragically on a larger scale have used ‘otherization’ to dehumanize entire groups of people in the past and continue to do so in the present: Immigrants to America, refugees of Ukraine, various groups during the Nazi regime (all of which I will talk about in future posts).

Don’t get me wrong, the experiences I’ve been leading here have been nothing short of phenomenal and I’ll be sure to write about all of the good times too. But I think I would be doing myself, and whoever reads these, a disservice if I did not write about the experience of being the ‘other’ as well. It is simply that integral to shed light on. By learning about being ‘the other’ we can be better equipped to identify groups being ‘otherized’. If we do that, we will be able to take action to mitigate the disparities and suffering caused by ‘otherization’.

    I often have taken for granted the position of influence I have held in this world. After being here, I will never take that for granted again. There is a great responsibility that comes from being in the position of the group that is not ‘othered’ – the white girl, in higher education, with no disabilities, with no debt, from a country that is safe and provides for me. Those lucky enough to sit on this side of the fence have a moral obligation to tear the fence down, bridge the gap and bring ‘the other’ to join them. My experiences here in Germany have surely changed my perspective on what that position means. After interacting with people in that position and seeing how much they have come to my aid to help me during my time in Germany I want to do the same. They empower me to want to safeguard this role moving forward. Even my smallest experience of ‘otherization’ here has proven to be a force multiplier of empathy for those who are othered. I find now that the capacity for change is magnified by and catalyzed into action by those who have experienced and/or witnessed the very thing that hurts us so.

    I hope you learn of ‘otherization’ when reading my posts, so you serve as witness to those experiences and also become empowered to act against it. But I also hope you get to hear about really cool travels, funny stories, once in a lifetime experience, times I really challenged myself, and times that I deliberately put myself in uncomfortable situations by reading these posts as well.

 

Here’s to figuring it out as I go, learning as I go … but going, nonetheless.

 

The hero has seven important choices to make, and they cannot be a bystander, they simply cannot be carried from plot point to plot point.

They must play an active role in their own story.

For it is in the cave they fear that lies the treasure they seek.